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IN WHICH ARE CONSIDERED THE 



LAWS OF ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS, 



THE MEANING OP 



THE WORD WILL, 



TRUE INTENT OF PUNISHMENT. 



BY 

HENRY "CARLETON, 

LATE ONE OF THE JUDGES OF THE SUPREME COURT OF LOUISIANA. 




Jiov. 2>0 



PHILADELPHIA: 

PARRY AND McMILLAN. 
1857. 



^ 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, in the Clerk's office 
of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. 



HKNRY B. A8HMEAD, BOOK AND JOB PRINTER, 
George Street above Eleventh. 



PREFACE. 



All questions in sciences founded on facts, are settled by 
an appeal to the facts themselves. Hence our knowledge of 
Astronomy, Optics, Chemistry, Geology and Mechanics, is 
continually enlarged by the discovery of additional facts, 
while in the department of Theology, the question of Liberty 
and Necessity still rests on hypothesis where it stood two 
thousand years ago. 

The disputants on both sides ascribe every action to the 
agency of a power they call the Will ; but what determines 
the Will to act, is the point upon which the whole controversy 
turns. 

On one side it is affirmed that nothing determines the Will 
— that it determines itself — that it is a spontaneity which can 
act without cause of action, and can choose among motives 
without reason or preference. 

The necessarians do not understand this logic. They affirm 
that the Will is always determined by the strongest motive, 
or judgment of the mind, which they say is the only guide of 
conduct vouchsafed to man. 



IV PREFACE. 

The difficulty lies in substituting hypothesis for facts, under 
the belief that facts could not be affirmed of mind as well as of 
matter, whereas we know nothing of matter but from a con- 
sciousness derived through the senses, and from the same con- 
sciousness only, do we know what takes place in the mind. 
The evidence of fact in both cases is the same. There is no 
true knowledge but in consciousness. 

That we feel pity, love, hatred, malice and resentment, are 
as truly facts as that iron sinks in water, or that rain falls 
from the clouds, and unless we are conscious of these and all 
other facts we possess, we could have no knowledge of them 
whatever. 

When a jury is convinced by the testimony of a witness, 
their conviction is as much a fact, as the existence of the wit- 
ness himself. 

The sensations caused by the light and heat of the sun, are 
a3 truly facts as the existence of that luminary in the heavens. 

That the features of one person do necessarily remind us of 
those of another, merely by the force of resemblance, is a fact 
known to every man from his own experience. 

So the existence of any judgment, opinion or belief, attest- 
ed by consciousness,, is as truly a fact as any occurrence in 
the external world. 

All phenomena of mind, therefore, being so many facts, 
every question in mental philosophy may be settled as in other 
sciences, by an appeal to the facts themselves. Moreover, the 
immediate antecedents to these phenomena, are sensations, 
ideas and their combinations, which can be distinctly traced 
from their first elements up to those perceptions and judgments 
of the mind, that are the true and sole causes of action. 

I do not pretend to have discovered what wai not known 



PREFACE. V 

before. My aim has been to direct attention to truths we 
already possess : and if, as I trust it shall appear, that all 
phenomena of mind are so many facts ; that ideas act upon 
the mind, and not the mind upon ideas ; that all their combi- 
nations are formed by their own laws of aggregation, and that 
the mind cannot command or originate an idea for itself, then 
all further doubt upon the question of Liberty and Necessity 
must cease. 

If I possess any knowledge of my subject, it is mostly the 
fruit of twenty-five years experience at the Bar, and of obser- 
vation while on the Bench. 

The Bar is one of the best schools for the study of the mind 
— an argument is but a train of associated ideas ; conviction, 
judgment, execution are its direct consequences. 

For the first just hint on the association of ideas and the 
true meaning of the word Will, I am indebted to a treatise on 
the Mind, by James Mill ; and if it should appear that he has 
fallen into an occasional error, yet there is enough of truth in 
his work, if followed to its legitimate results, to place him 
among the first metaphysicians of any age. 

Weary of theory and hypothesis, and shut out from the free 
use of books from a defective vision, I sought and attained the 
truth in the phenomena of my own mind. Every man possess- 
es the same means of information within himself. All books 
written on the Mind from the time of Aristotle until now, can 
teach him nothing beyond what his own consciousness attests 
to be true. When he is thirsty. he drinks; the desire for 
water he knows to be the sole cause of action. This is nature. 
Such an agent as the Will is defined to be, has no place in the 
human mind. 

If in the following pages I have necessarily employed the 

1* 



VI PREFACE. 

term Will in the sense in which it is used by writers and in 
common speech, it was that I might show that the true causes 
of action existed independently of its agency. 

Whether or no I have truly stated the phenomena of mind 
as they occur, is merely a question of fact, to be tested by 
every man's own consciousness, and not by argument. 



CONTENTS. 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 



CHAPTER I. 



PAGE. 



Elements of knowledge are few, but capable of almost endless com- 
binations 9 

Inventions are simply combinations of ideas familiar to all 11 

We think from necessity * 11 

Ideas and sensations undefinable 12, 13 

The soul, the percipient of all knowledge, can give no account of 

itself 14 

Immutable laws inferred from a succession of like phenomena. ... 15, 16, 17 

Delegated laws 19 

Laws of thought : Ideas precede volition, and not volition ideas.. . 19, 20, 21 
They are active in dreams where there is no volition, and are go- 
verned by inherent laws 21, 22 

Mental philosophy an induction from facts ; true causes of associa- 
tion first known to Mr. Hume 22, 23 



CHAPTER II. 

CONTIGUITY, CAUSE OF ASSOCIATION. 

Ideas bound up in words 25, 26, 27 

Every definition must contain the precise number of ideas that 

enter the word 27 

Ideas bound up in words, continued 28 

Ideas suggested by the position of objects 29 

Ideas suggest one another, illustrated by conversation 30, 31, 32 

Geography, history, mere associations of ideas 32 

Contiguity, source of tedious stories and long harangues 33, 34, 35 

Why a concise style pleases 85 

Do sensations and ideas make different impressions among them- 
selves 36 



Vlll CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 

CHAPTER III. 

Resemblance, fertile source of associations — comparison 37, 38, 39, 40 

Mind, passive under resemblances, as under sensations 41 

Classification is altogether from natural resemblances — is made for 

us and not by us, we do not accept or reject 41, 42 

CHAPTER IV. 

Associations from cause and effect 43, 44 

The past becomes the interpreter of the future in physics and 

morals 44, 45, 46 

Science propagates itself, as in geology, astronomy, gravitation, 

light, &c 46, 47, 48, 49 

Ideas are the offspring of our wants, never of the will. 50, 51, 52 

Genius, what 53, 54 

Spontaneous associations, vagaries 54, 55, 56 

Imagination, no such faculty exists 57, 58 

CHAPTER V. 

Attention is not in the power of the will — it is measured by the 
interest felt in the object — ideas cannot be viewed separately 
and detained in the mind 59, 60, 61, 62, 63 

CHAPTER VI. 

Memory never under the control of the will 65 

To remember or forget is not in our power 66, 70 

The mind essentially passive until aroused by sensations or ideas. 71, 72 

To reason, is to perceive, unavoidably, the forms and relations of 
ideas as they arise to the mind. Illustrations — instructions to 
representatives, lawyers and j udg6s — no opinion can stand still 
in philosophy, laws or creeds of religion 73, 77 



WILL. 



CHAPTER VII. 

The qucHtion of liberty and necessity of easy solution 81 

A ut horn di.sagreo in their definitions of the will 82 

Edwards' opinions examined, and shown to be contradictory 82, 83 

His doctrine of moral necessity 83, 84 



CONTENTS. IX 

PAGE. 

COUSIN 

Places motive or preference on the same basis with. Edwards 84 

BIELFIELD 

Affirms that the understanding errs, and the will embraces the 

errors 85 

LOCKE 

Thinks that the power of the will is limited to action — that it obeys 

the determination of the j udgment 85 

MALEBRANCHE 

Thinks that it is the province of the will to reason, and of the un- 
derstanding to perceive 85 

RE ID, CLARK Ej HOBBES 

Say that the will is the last dictate of the understanding 86 

Gall and Spurzheim adopt the same opinion 86 

DR. BROWN 

Says that action follows immediately upon desire alone, and that 

he is never conscious of such a power as the will 86 

Payne and Young are inclined to the same opinion. 86 

HUME 

Ascribes the power of new perceptions to the will — his opinion ex- 
amined 87, 88 

AIME MARTIN 

Has revived the Manichean notion of two wills, spiritual and ani- 
mal SS 

Cousin's perplexity increases at every attempt to define the will. . S9 

After making it every thing and nothing, he proceeds to define its 

powers 89, 90 

A disciple of Mr. Cousin, a professor in an American University, 
gives a still more fearful account of the will, it acts because it 

is able to act, and always without cause 90, 92 

When a Freewiller is pressed for proof, he retreats behind his con- 
sciousness, as an enthusiast does for inspiration 91 

They nevertheless act from motives as other men 92 

If motives move the will to move the man, as the necessarians say, 
why not let motives act directly ? nature never employs two 
causes for one effect 93 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 

By choosing the weaker motive, the will acts against the cause of 

action 94 

The power that chooses must judge, hence the will becomes the 

" I," the "me," the "man" 95 

That men could have done otherwise than they did, under the 

same circumstances, is a delusion often exposed 95, 96 

TRIAL AND DEFENCE OP THE GUILTY BARBER FOR MURDER, BEFORE A 
TRIBUNAL, WHOSE JUDGES, JURY AND ADVOCATE WERE ALL FREE- 
WILLERS. 

The address of counsel in defence, sets out fully their practical doc- 
trines 97, 106 

Charge of the court ; acquittal of the barber 106, 107 

VOLITION, CHOICE, FACULTY. 

If choice lie in the determination of the mind, it cannot lie in a 
faculty of the mind — it is the mind itself that chooses, reasons, 
hears, sees — faculty is thus made an entity 108, 109, 110 

Though Mr. Locke warns us that by faculty he means only a mode 
of thinking, yet he relapses into the same error with Edwards 
— metaphysicians seldom fail to treat the will as an agent 
dwelling in the inner man, and such is their belief 110, 111, 112 

The power exerted over the mind by sensations and ideas, the true 

and direct causes of action 112, 113, 114 

SENSATIONS, CAUSES OF ACTION. 

Every one knows that his mind, when passive, is suddenly aroused 
by sensations, &c, the progress of sensations until they termi- 
nate in action — among sensations the strongest always pre- 
vails , 114, 115 

IDEAS, CAUSES OF ACTION. 
Their power perceived on our features as well as in action 115, 118 

CHOICE CONTINUED. 

Choice, nothing more than an agreeable impression made necessa- 
rily upon the mind, through the senses or from information 
derived from others — various illustrations — choice implies ne- 
cessarily the best — it is made for us and not by us — as in the 
perception of the greatest apparent good in which the will has 
no concern 118, 125 

15 1 LI I B»j OPINION. 

Absurd notion on this subject — belief, not in our power — it is an 

oli'ect, testimony the cause 126, 127, 128 



CONTENTS. XI 



Varies its aspect with the progress of evidence — it is necessarily 

to every man what it appears to be 128, 129 

CAUSES OF ACTION — CONTINUED. 

Every one knows the causes of action on the minutest occasions — 
on subjects of magnitude, he pauses for further light which 
the subjects themselves are sure to bring by their own associa- 
tions 13 

PURPOSE. 

When a man acts directly from the force of conviction, that is what 

is meant by the will in common speech 131 

A fixed purpose carried into effect, cannot be explained by a rapid 

succession of volitions 131, 132 

Succession of actions explained by a succession of thoughts 132, 133 

The opinions of Locke and Edwards would have been unassail- 
able, had they ascribed all action to the power of sensations and 

ideas — the interposition of the will does not vary the effect 133 

Comment on the Encyclopedia Britannica 134 

Change of action, illustrated by change of opinion in a voter 134, 135, 136 

PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS 

Between a necessarian, a Freewiller, a lesser motive man, and a 

disciple of Dr. Brown at a dinner table 136, 137 

FACTS — PHENOMENA. 

The only forces that can disturb the mind are sensations, ideas, 
and their combinations; these are so many facts through 
which alone the truth can be known 13S, 139 

The best book on metaphysics is every man's own mind — Descartes, 

Hobbes 139 

GREATEST APPARENT GOOD. 

The desire of pleasure, whether virtuous or vicious, is the motive 

power — it is as gravitation to matter, inseparable 140 

Pleasure and pain are our masters — opinion of Jeremy Bentham. . 140 

Will and pleasure, convertible terms 141 

Pleasure, sole spring of action ; but philosophers, unable to con- 
ceive how it could produce action, have contrived an auxilia- 
ry agent, the will, which renders the subject still more obscure 142, 143, 144 
If we substitute desire for will, we shall perceive it to be the ne- 
cessary cause of action in all breathing things 144 



Xll CONTENTS. 



PUNISHMENT. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

According to the Freewillers, punishment would he mere revenge 

for an act in which motive had no part 147, 148 

Just among necessarians, since the motive can be changed 148 

SIN AND CRIME EXIST OP NECESSITY. 

The best solution of the question of liberty and necessity found in 
the history of man 

That he sins from necessity, we have the same proofs as of any 
fixed law of nature 

Upon this known principle of human nature, legislators enact pen- 
alties against crime before committed 

Freewillers enact no penalty, for motives do not govern the will. . 

All physical and moral evil exist of necessity, and must therefore 
have entered the providence of God at the creation 

Idle speculations of theologians on the existence of evil 

The innocent are confounded with the guilty in all the dispensa- 
tions of Providence, whether physical or moral — errors of 
judgment, fatal to the innocent 

Presumption of divines in an attempt to apologize for evil. 

God can do no wrong ; he can commit no sin — no standard above 
himself. 

Punishment causes a change of motive, therefore, a remedy for sin 
and crime 

Upon this principle rests the codes of all nations and the denuncia- 
tions of Scripture 

Upon the same principle all children are disciplined and educated. 

LAWS ARE REMEDIAL. 

Lawgivers aim at the prevention of crime by countervailing mo- 
tives 161 

If the disease of mind be not cured, the wrong doer is cut off from 

society as a patient is by bodily disease 161 

The Egyptians treated ignorance as a disease of the mind — educa- 
tion was the cure. The moderns aim at the same result by 
more ample instruction 162, 163 

Jf evils come by the dispensations of Providence, let us not com- 
plain, He has provided the remedy 164 

Conclusion 165 





149 




149 




150 




150 


151, 


152 




152 


153. 


,154 


154, 


,155 


156, 


157 




158 




159 


159, 


,160 



OF THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 



CHAPTER I. 

OF THE ELEMENTS OF KNOWLEDGE. 

Writers agree that external objects act of 
necessity through the senses, and that all the 
elements of knowledge are thus forced upon the 
mind by laws it cannot resist. 

Impressions from without are called sensa- 
tions, and when revived in memory, are called 
ideas ; and although the original stock may be 
small, yet will it appear inexhaustible when we 
consider that colors, sounds, and tastes, afford 
gradations almost without end ; that there is no 
limit to the variations of form which are but the 
inflections of aline; that all the varieties of 
plants on the globe are composed of four con- 
stituent gases; that the multiplied modes of 
architecture, of machinery, or of the vehicles in 
which we traverse sea or land, are shaped of 
timber cut from the forest, of marble from the 
quarry, or of iron dug from the earth; that the 
continual addition of an unit will measure the dis- 
2 



10 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

tance to the sun ; that of twelve digits only, 
four hundred and seventy millions of combina- 
tions may be formed; that the varied sounds of 
all languages, all the wisdom and learning of 
man, can be expressed by the combinations of 
the letters of the alphabet; that twenty-four 
bells would yield a greater number of sounds 
than could be struck in the longest life ; that 
the science of geometry is reared upon a few 
definitions, each succeeding problem standing 
on its predecessor, and however lofty the fabric, 
that the same elements are discoverable at the 
summit that entered at the base ; that the pro- 
foundest investigations of the mathematician or 
astronomer, the highest conceptions of the poet 
or orator, those ever varying modes and forms 
of speech that instruct and delight, may all be 
traced to a few primary thoughts, common alike 
to the ignorant and the wise. From the same 
humble sources, genius continues to draw new 
and elevated beauties, although Ovid complain- 
ed that preceding poets had appropriated all the 
graces of speech to themselves, and left none 
for their successors. 

COMBINATIONS NOT INVENTIONS. 

A clock or telescope is said to be an inven- 
tion; but when examined in its details, the 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 11 

combination only turns out to be new, while the 
component ideas were as familiar to the age of 
Solomon as now. 

" There is nothing new under the sun," is as 
true of ideas as of things ; and he who first ap- 
plied the power of steam to machinery, could 
no more create a thought for himself than he 
could the metal of which the engine was made ; 
and if our descendants should hereafter contrive 
the means of travelling on the winds, it would 
nofrbe an invention, but a new arrangement of 
ideas already in store, as a new order of archi- 
tecture may be devised out of materials already 
in possession. Hence science and art will ever 
continue to advance, since their constituent ele- 
ments must, by their own movement, present 
other combinations, unexhausted and inexhaust- 
ible to the latest generations to come ; and when 
complex ideas, which become elemental by use, 
shall enter the associations, they must accele- 
rate the development of new and lofty truths 
that shall as far transcend the wisdom of the 
present age, as the Principia of Newton did the 
astronomy of the Egyptians or Greeks. 

WE THINK FROM NECESSITY. 

Every one is conscious of trains of ideas that 
pass across his mind in unbroken succession, in- 



12 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

dependently of his will. They come unbidden, 
often unwelcome, guests, that take possession 
of the mind, where they continue to combine, 
dissolve, and depart, from the moment we are 
awake until we again subside into sleep. To 
think, is to perceive the forms and relations they 
present; and as we cannot refuse to perceive 
them, so are we made to think in spite of our- 
selves. 

IDEAS AND SENSATIONS INDEFINABLE. 

What are sensations and ideas? If, as is 
said, they exist only in consciousness, how shall 
we explain their re-appearance after they cease 
to exist? They can be neither matter nor 
spirit ; and it is inconceivable how they can be 
attributes of either. 

Plato thought they were coeval with matter ; 
Malbranche and Berkley ascribed them to the 
immediate agency of the Deity ; Leibnitz ima- 
gined they were a part of the harmonies of na- 
ture, subsisting independently of mind or body ; 
Hobbes, Priestly, and Cooper, thought they arose 
from the mere organization of matter ; Kant dis- 
covered them slumbering in the reason ; Victor 
Cousin supposed them to be real existences; 
Locke confounds them with sensations; Mill 
defines them to be copies of impressions receiv- 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 13 

ed from objects without; and, since the time of 
Dr. Brown, most of the Scotch and English 
writers consider them as so many states of mind, 
no matter from what source derived. Whatever 
they may be, atoms or attributes, species, forms, 
images, phantom or shade, something or no- 
thing ; by whatever name they are called, sen- 
sations, ideas, thoughts, conceptions, or percep- 
tions, they are the disturbing forces that arouse 
and direct every movement of the soul. We 
are conscious of their existence — and here all 
inquiry must end. To define them is impos- 
sible, since every definition must consist of 
terms previously understood, or the definition 
itself will be unintelligible. Nevertheless they 
are the vehicles of all the knowledge we possess; 
they instruct us in the past, the present, and 
the future, in the forms and qualities of bodies, 
motions and magnitudes of the planets, measure 
time and space, solve the mysteries of the tides, 
but reveal not themselves. Though the most 
subtle and evanescent of all things, yet are they 
made obedient in speech, bound up in books, en- 
graven on brass, rendered visible in the produc- 
tions of art, in the steam engine, in the con- 
struction of fleets and cities, temples and 
palaces — reason, judgment, opinion, imagination, 

creed, religion, law, and philosophy, are but so 

9* 



14 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

many different forms of thought ; as we think, 
so are we gay or sad, virtuous or vicious, wise 
or foolish, Jew or Gentile, Mahometan, heretic, 
infidel or Christian. In thought only do we 
seem to exist, for when we lie down in sleep we 
become extinct to ourselves and the world 
around us. 

THE SOUL. 

The soul too, the passive recipient of thought, 
is as ignorant of its own nature as of the thoughts 
themselves. It can perceive the manner in 
which its ideas are required, but when interro- 
gated, What art thou ? it makes no reply. It 
cannot explain its own organization, or whether 
it be organized or not; whether it be a mere 
point, or composed of parts, is an attribute or 
subject. 

It can give no account of its beginning or end, 
or define that consciousness by which it mea- 
sures its own duration. It takes cognizance of 
its own properties as it does those of matter, 
but is equally ignorant of the basis in which 
they reside. Physiologists say it inhabits the 
head, but they have not fixed its precise locality. 
The Greeks supposed it to be a compound 
substance ; the Chaldeans, a lucid fire diffused 
through the body; while Phrenologists assign 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 15 

its faculties to distinct compartments of the 
brain. It can settle none of these questions 
for itself. It perceives from necessity, and 
impels to action according to its perceptions, 
and when exhausted by fatigue, its functions 
are restored by sleep, which is a suspension of 
them all. It is equally at fault when it looks 
into the body, its temporary home. It finds 
itself provided with organs of hearing, seeing, 
tasting, touching and smelling, but knows not 
how they convey tidings from without. The 
heart beats, the blood circulates, the lungs 
respire, the stomach digests ; it observes these 
phenomena, but perceives not their causes. 
There is but one cause, that great Incompre- 
hensible Being who created and governs the 
Universe according to his own good pleasure; 
whose laws extend throughout the whole com- 
pass of matter and mind, ever and immutably 
the same. 

IMMUTABLE LAWS. 

From the uniform course of phenomena in 
the material world, we infer the existence of 
immutable laws : for the same reason we are 
bound to infer their existence in the department 
of mind. The tides uniformly obey the moon, 
heavy bodies continue to fall to the earth, rivers 



16 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

to flow to the sea, heat to revive vegetation, to 
raise vapor into clouds, lightning to explode, 
rains to descend, plants and animals to multiply, 
decay and die, from the beginning as now. 

As in matter, so in mind; the elements of 
knowledge continue to come to us, as to our 
ancestors, through their appointed channels; 
ideas combine and form images now as in the 
minds of Homer and David, numbers and fig- 
ures in geometry, present the same relations as 
they did to Euclid ; and in similar circumstan- 
ces men have uniformly thought and acted alike 
in all ages of the world. 

The history of man is but the history of his 
mind; action is the offspring of ideas; Alex- 
ander conceived the conquest of Asia, before 
he embarked in the enterprise ; all those plots, 
wars and revolutions that overturn kingdoms 
and states ; all the actions, pursuits and works 
of man, whether for good or for evil, are but 
the outward expression of thoughts within. If, 
therefore, our thoughts were not regulated by 
uniform laws, mankind could not become the 
subjects of government, human or divine ; or, 
if their actions were the offspring of a self-deter- 
mining will, they would be equally beyond the 
control of the Deity, whose foreknowledge lies 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 17 

only in His power to execute what Himself had 
decreed should come to pass.* 

SPECIAL PROVIDENCE. 

That class of waiters who resolve all pheno- 
mena of mind or matter into the immediate act 
of God, will hardly affirm that He prompts men 
to the commission of crime ; yet such must be 
their doctrine, as it is incredible that a part of 
the same mind should be governed by a par- 
ticular providence, and the rest left to some 
antagonist power; that all rivers should flow to 
the sea; that heavy bodies and light should sink 
or swim by a particular providence; that the 
specific gravity of gold, silver, iron or lead, and 
of all things else sold by weight, should be the 
exact measure of the Divine power, exerted 
upon each towards the centre of the earth, or 
that a special providence should fashion every 
drop that falls from the clouds ; trace the lines 
and colors of every blade of grass ; superintend 
the flight of every insect at the tropics or the 
poles — a doctrine not in harmony with the great- 
ness of God, since it denies Him the power to 

* Hence John Scotus, who is greatly lauded for his wisdom, 
affirms that God could not foresee the existence of sin, since 
he had not decreed it, and consequently there could be no pre- 
destination of the wicked, who could not be known until after 
the offence committed. 



18 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

impart necessary laws for the government of 
His own creation. 

Whatever may be the theories of philosophers, 
the course of events proclaim the existence of 
invariable laws which, every man's own expe- 
rience compels him to believe. In practical life 
no one supposes that fire burns wood, or cooks 
his food; that the blood circulates, or the 
stomach digests by a particular providence ; that 
men defraud each other; that a mother loves her 
children ; or that the blow of the assassin is by 
the agency of a particular providence. Nor do 
we ever ascribe the actions of animals to a par- 
ticular providence, but suppose the dog barks, 
the horse neighs, the bird sings ; that the lamb 
is gentle and the tiger ferocious, each by a law 
appointed to their kind. The artisan never 
ascribes the motion in the wheels of a watch to 
the special act of Providence, but to the main- 
spring, in which he knows the power to reside. 
The physician never imagines that opium causes 
sleep, that arsenic poisons ; or the chemist that 
oxygen rusts iron, that alkalis neutralize acids, 
or that the mercury rises in the sun, or falls in 
the shade by a special providence. No advo- 
cate supposes he ever gained a bad cause or 
lost a good one, or that the jury pronounced a 
verdict, or the judge his decree, by a special 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 19 

providence ; nor does the law-giver enact penal- 
ties against the act of God, but against crime, 
which he believes to come of a propensity in- 
herent in the constitution of man. 

DELEGATED LAWS. 

All changes in matter and mind do, no doubt, 
take place in obedience to the will of Grocl ; not 
by particular acts, but by delegated laws, as a 
clock continues its motion under the pressure of 
weights in the absence of the mechanic, or the 
decrees of a monarch are enforced without his 
immediate agency. 

But it is said that the effect would be the 
same, whether the world were governed by 
uniform laws, or by a series of particular acts. 
Not so j for under a government of particular 
acts, no rule of conduct could be prescribed, or 
law violated, since none could exist. 

LAWS OF THOUGHT. 

Tired of conjecture, metaphysicians begin to 
regard the phenomena of mind as so many facts, 
from which to infer the existence of uniform 
laws ; and enough is already known to encourage 
the belief that the laws of thought will soon be 
as well understood as the fall of bodies or mo- 
tion of fluids. 



20 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

Ideas take forcible possession of the mind as 
soon as we are awake; we cannot deny them 
admission, arrest their progress, or expel them, 
if we would. We know not whence they come 
or whither they go ; whether they expire or de- 
part, are revived or return. Nevertheless, most 
writers are persuaded, and the masses of man- 
kind universally believe, that their thoughts, 
like so many slaves, come at their bidding. No- 
thing can be further from the truth ; for ideas 
not present to the mind cannot be perceived ; 
and what is not perceived cannot be the subject 
of command. A man cannot command his hat 
or his cloak, unless the idea of his hat or cloak 
were already in his mind ; the idea must pre- 
cede the command, and not the command the 
idea, as truly as light must precede vision, and 
not vision light. Ideas are always first in the 
order of time, they precede volition, and not 
volition ideas ; hence we have no power to choose 
what ideas shall enter the mind. 

They come to us as travellers arrive at an 
inn, or people pass along a street, we know not 
the next man until he appears ; so we cannot 
perceive the next idea in the train, until it is 
actually in the mind, when it is too late to for- 
bid its entrance there. 

For the same reason, every change of topic, 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 21 

or subject of reflection, must arise by its own 
laws of association, or from impressions from 
without, and never by any effort of our own. 
We cannot, for example, change the conversa- 
tion from the properties of light to those of 
gold, unless the idea of gold had first entered 
the mind. Trains of ideas can only be broken 
up by introducing others in their stead ; but 
what command have we over thoughts unper- 
ceived and not in the mind ? 

Let him who thinks otherwise, make the trial 
for himself, and he will laugh at his own folly 
in attempting what he discovers to be a mere 
absurdity. In the absence of all other proofs, 
the associations of ideas in dreams establishes 
their spontaneous movement beyond all possi- 
bility of a doubt. They often combine into 
images of the highest beauty, reason out a diffi- 
cult case, revive the memory of distant objects, 
excite to tears or to laughter, or startle us by 
misshapen forms and unreal dangers, in all of 
which it is not pretended the will takes any part 
whatever, or that any idea can arise from 
chance. 

To one who has not studied the subject, our 
thoughts may seem to wander at hazard rather 
than by established law. 

A gentleman once inveighed against the in- 
3 



22 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

gratitude of Brutus towards Caesar ; the thought 
gave rise to new trains of ideas, that ran by 
regular gradation into the mode of making wa- 
fers. They presently turned upon the sudden 
death of a child, and in a moment thereafter, 
became ludicrous, even to laughter. They next 
dwelt for a time upon mere trifles, metal buttons 
and silk hats, when suddenly they grappled with 
the abuses of power and the Hungarian Revolu- 
tion. Yet not an idea arose from chance ; and 
however rapid and divergent the transitions, a 
skillful observer might have detected the law 
of connection. 

MENTAL PHILOSOPHY, AN INDUCTION FROM FACTS. 

All phenomena of mind are so many facts, of 
which we have as distinct a consciousness as of 
any occurrence derived through the senses from 
without. In facts alone consist all we can know 
of the human mind. 

That various ideas are instantly associated 
around any object when its name is pronounced; 
as a house, a tree, or the ocean, we have the 
same evidence as of the existence of the objects 
themselves. That ideas are associated and 
bound up in words; or are knit together by 
repetition, as in the alphabet, or inflections of a 
verb, is known to every schoolboy; but of that 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 23 

subtile ligature that holds them together, or that 
mysterious movement by which they multiply 
themselves, we shall ever remain ignorant until 
the power that perceives shall explain the nature 
of its own perceptions. The subject of associ- 
ation of ideas was first noticed by Aristotle and 
afterwards by Hobbes in what he called " dis- 
course of mind or coherence of conception;" 
but it was Mr. Hume who first detected the 
true causes of association to be " contiguity in 
time and place, resemblance and cause and 
effect/' terms not altogether appropriate, but 
which must serve our purpose until better can 
be devised. 



CHAPTER II. 



CONTIGUITY IN TIME AND PLACE IDEAS BOUND UP 

IN WORDS, ETC. 

Ideas associated with any object, rise irresist- 
ibly to the mind, at the thought of the object 
itself. Pronounce the name Cato, and the 
virtues of that Roman, his struggles for the 
liberties of his country, his flight before Caesar 
and suicide at Utica, will be instantaneously 
revived in the memory without any effort of 
the mind itself. So the word "Greece" will 
draw in its train, its geographical position, com- 
ponent states, cities, ports, islands, inhabitants, 
poets, philosophers, heroes and battles, from the 
time of Cecrops until its conquest by the 
Romans. Every thing known or written upon 
its history lies bound up in that word "Greece." 
At ; the thought of the American Revolution, 
its causes, armies, commanders, wars, its pro- 
gress, vicissitudes and termination, pass across 
the mind as the scenes in a drama. 

The word " Italy" instantly presents an en- 
3* 



26 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

tire picture of that country — its form, limits, 
the surrounding sea, its climate ; mountains 
stretching its entire length; its rivers, the Ti- 
ber, Arno, and Po ; its cities, Genoa, Pisa, 
Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples — their aque- 
ducts, streets, pavement, architecture, and a 
multitude of other objects, flash across the 
mind with a rapidity that no utterance can over- 
take. When a traveller speaks of England, the 
entire island with Scotland on the north, Ire- 
land on the west, its hills and valleys, pleasure 
grounds, cultivated fields, canals and railways — 
London with its palaces, churches, and bridges, 
and the multitudes that roll like rivers along 
the streets — start up to view spontaneously, as 
a sudden creation. Ideas are provided for us, 
we do not provide them for ourselves ; they 
come to us by laws we did not make, and can- 
not control. And such is the rapidity of their 
movement, that while we listen to a speaker in 
public debate, we often find time, without losing 
a word he utters, to draw upon the histories of 
different countries, for illustrations he had over- 
looked — to criticise his style and manner ; to 
anticipate his conclusions, and often to argue 
his cause against him, with those very associa- 
tions he had unconsciously raised in our minds. 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 27 

IDEAS BOUND UP IN WORDS, CONTINUED. 

When from the pulpit we hear of Baptism, 
Repentance, Predestination, Justification, Atone- 
ment, each word is a treatise in itself. By the 
terms inheritance, trover, equity, injunction, the 
advocate brings his whole library to the con- 
test, as a general his forces to the field. 

DEFINITIONS. 

All knowledge lies in the just association of 
ideas. King, subject, master, servant, husband, 
wife, virtue, vice, longitude, equator, gravita- 
tion, sympathy, piety, patriotism, are but so 
many groups of ideas held together by associa- 
tion; the words alone reveal the nature and 
functions of each. Every definition, to be cor- 
rect, must contain the precise number of ideas 
that enter the combination : the addition or sub- 
traction of a single thought would entirely over- 
throw the force of the term. Words, which are 
the representatives of ideas, must multiply and 
expand with the ideas themselves ; hence dic- 
tionaries must, for the same reason, be in a state 
of perpetual growth and reproduction. 

IDEAS BOUND UP IN WORDS, CONTINUED. 

The names of substances, as gold, iron, wood, 
stone, bread, apple, opium, sugar, are groups of 



28 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

ideas bound up in words, as are the properties 
in the substances themselves. The associations, 
when once formed, are not easily dissolved. 

The idea of sweetness does not lose its hold 
on sugar and pass over to opium, else we could 
not distinguish food from poison, or one sub- 
stance from another. Nor are the associations 
formed by an effort of our own. When a plough- 
man is told, for the first time, that gold is 
heavier than iron, the idea attaches itself to his 
notion of gold, and becomes the representative 
of a permanent property. The sight of an ac- 
quaintance will revive the images of his entire 
family. We inquire of the progress of one 
child in music, of another in Latin, of the acci- 
dent that befell the third : — more, the position 
of his house and contiguous buildings, its apart- 
ments, furniture, and ornaments, irresistibly rise 
to the memory. At the next moment we meet 
a friend from the West : " When did you ar- 
rive?" " Yesterday, in a steamer from Pitts- 
burg." Instantly the Ohio presents itself with 
all its varied scenery — hills, rocks, towns, and 
cities ; next, the Mississippi — its muddy waters, 
alluvial banks, moveable sands, islands, tower- 
ing cypresses balancing their mossy arms in the 
breeze, with a hundred other characteristic fea- 
tures of that wonderful stream. 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 29 

IDEAS SUGGESTED BY THE POSITION OF OBJECTS, ETC. 

Nature is always great, but never more so than 
in the means by which she keeps us continu- 
ally informed of the true position of objects, 
upon which our preservation depends. A pilot 
steers his ship by the association of ideas. 
When first he perceives the distant light, the 
bearings, depths and windings of the channel, 
the rocks, bars, islands, shallows, and path 
marked for his ship, immediately rise before 
him in the relations they hold in nature. 

When a blind man lays his hand upon a known 
object, every relative object instantly takes its 
proper place in the mind, so that he is taught 
by the laws of association, how to direct his 
steps through the unseen streets and crooked 
alleys of the populous city. 

When Ave ascend a flight of steps to enter 
our chamber or library in the dark, these asso- 
ciations take the place of sight, and present us 
with the form, position, and color of objects as 
seen by the light of the sun. 

These facts are seldom considered, because 
familiar to all, but are not the less wonderful 
on that account. 

IDEAS SUGGEST ONE ANOTHER, ETC. 

Contiguity is the fruitful parent of ideas in 



30 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

every conversation. When any subject is men- 
tioned, as the Protestant Reformation, instantly 
every mind is filled with kindred thoughts. 
One dwells upon the character of Luther, an- 
other upon that of Leo; a third upon the sale 
of indulgences ; a fourth declares that the money 
was applied to pious uses — the building of 
churches. The associations necessarily vary 
with every hearer ; and thus ideas are made to 
propagate themselves in any and every direc- 
tion by the means appointed by Providence to 
supply thought to the human mind. 

An example more in detail will better illus- 
trate this law of association. 

As our steamer approached the city of New 
York, a passenger said he intended to lodge his 
family at the Astor House. A lady near him 
observed it was an agreeable place, were it not 
for the continual uproar in the streets. 

2d Lady. — "It is very quiet in the back 
apartments." 

1st Lady. — "But there you lose sight of the 
Park, the fountains, Theatre, Museum, and es- 
pecially of that famous Broadway, where all 
the world is to be seen." 

2d Gentleman. — " I prefer the quiet of the 
cross streets." 

3d Gentleman. — " It is nowhere quiet in New 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 31 

York ; every street is distracted by noise ; com- 
merce takes its level. The wharves of both 
rivers are encumbered with merchandise. Pearl 
street is beset with drays, boxes, and coopers ; 
Wall Street with money-changers, banks, and 
brokers. In Greenwich, Chatham, Canal Streets, 
and the Bowery, the retail business is prodigious ; 
one can hardly cross a street without danger of 
being crushed by an omnibus." 

2d Lady. — u It is a great city ; it commands 
riches from the interior, and is always acces- 
sible from the ocean. From Brooklyn heights 
we have a view of its magnificent harbour, ani- 
mated with all sorts of living things, secured 
by a narrow entrance, bounded on all sides by 
high land terminating in the distant mountains 
of Jersey." 

Passenger. — " It is more magnificent than the 
Bay of Naples." Here the law of contiguity 
was interrupted by a comparison, but instantly 
recommenced at the word, Naples, when its 
streets, Theatre, Museum, population, quays, 
palaces, the king, Vesuvius, Pompeii, Hercu- 
laneum, excavations and relics, were all in turn 
the topics of conversation. 

2d Gentleman. — "The first object I hastened 
to see on arriving at Naples, was Virgil's Tomb, 
but found nothing there, not even the Urn said 
to be deposited by Augustus." 



32 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

"Id Lady. — "I had rather see the Tomb of 
his great translator, Dryden : Virgil is a greater 
poet only because his works are 1800 years 
older than Dryden s." 

Passenger. — "Madam, I perceive you have 
not read the original." Here the trains were 
again interrupted by a discussion on the com- 
parative merits of the two Poets, which in turn 
gave way to impressions from objects on the 
shore which we now approached. 

GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, TRAVELS, ETC. 

Geography, books of travels, history, biog- 
raphy, are but the records of ideas, associated 
with things and persons, and bound up in so 
many words. The geography of Holland is an 
enumeration of particulars appertaining to the 
country, its roads, canals, bridges, towns, dykes, 
agriculture and cities, as truly as the enumera- 
tion of the properties of lead is a description of 
that metal. So all buying and selling consists 
of a detailed account of the properties of things 
to which prices are annexed. 

CONTIGUITY CONTINUED. 

Contiguity is the fertile source of those tedious 
stories in which great talkers abound ; of those 
long harangues at the bar and in the pulpit; 
and of those minute subdivisions of a subject 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 33 

that weary attention by the accumulation of 
particulars which the subject will infallibly sug- 
gest of itself. 

I drew near a group of seamen on the deck 
of a vessel at sea, listening to a comrade explain- 
ing his motives for becoming a sailor. He be- 
gan from his earliest remembrance, described 
minutely the paternal house with every con- 
tiguous object, yard, trees, gate, spring-house, 
the abundance of its stores, the cows — here he 
was interrupted. " Go on with your story, no mat- 
ter about the covjs!" When he was old enough 
he was put to the plough ; here he dwelt minutely 
upon the qualities of a favorite horse. Again 
interrupted — u go on tvith your story:" but he 
could not take leave of the horse without call- 
ing him by many endearing, names. When he 
was put to school every circumstance was set 
out with the same irksome details ; again inter- 
rupted — "go on tvith your story/' but he insisted 
on describing his playfellows, and the cruel 
flogging given Jim Jenkins by the teacher. 
His story was protracted nearly two hours, with 
many interruptions and oaths from his hearers, 
and amounted in substance to this, that he 
and Jim Jenkins, tired of school, ran away and 
entered the service of a ship bound to Rot- 
terdam. 
4 



34 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

Contiguity is the chief source of thought to 
the ignorant and uneducated. Ploughing, sow- 
ing, reaping, the qualities of grain or hay, are 
topics ever new and inexhaustible to the farmer. 
Artificers in iron, wood or leather, talk more 
than the astronomer. A mother can descant 
upon the habits, tastes and genius of her children 
every day in the year; and slaves who labor in 
the field are known to spend whole nights in 
the pleasures of conversation. The illiterate 
are never at a loss for thought, since the com- 
binations of a few ideas may be varied to the 
end of life. The ideas of a philosopher may 
be more comprehensive, but it does not follow 
they are more numerous. He waits in silence 
for loftier and broader associations, while the 
minds of the ignorant are replete with details, 
which are sure in the end to turn upon them- 
selves and their respective pursuits. 

Contiguity supplies most ideas that enter 
every description or narration, and at the same 
time furnishes a just rule of criticism by which 
they are to be tested. A subject ^will, by its 
own necessity, draw after it every contiguous 
association. Says a traveller at sea, "the main- 
mast of the ship was struck by lightning in a 
storm, and three seamen killed." The descrip- 
tion is brief and just; the whole scene instan- 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 35 

taneously breaks upon the mind; the vessel, its 
position in the water, hull, rigging, deck, hold, 
cabin, officers, the storm and bolt from the 
cloud. If the writer had enumerated all these 
particulars, he would have fatigued the reader 
with details, which would be unavoidably and 
instantaneously suggested by the subject itself. 
A word will often suffice, where a sentence would 
weaken the effect. Hence the beauty and power 
of a concise style ; the leading idea being sug- 
guested, its associations instantly arise, without 
retarding the movement of mind. Thoughts 
to be bright, must like the solar beams be con- 
densed. Enough should be said to arouse kin- 
dred associations, no more; they will supply 
spontaneously and without effort, details that 
would be irksome in the mouth of the speaker. 
Hence the force of wit, and of those concise 
sayings found in almost every language on the 
globe. 

1)0 SENSATIONS AND IDEAS MAKE DIFFERENT IMPRES- 
SIONS AMONG THEMSELVES ? 

Though we cannot ascribe space or substance 
to ideas, yet they seem to be copies of the real 
magnitudes of objects without. The idea of 
France seems broader than the idea of Holland; 
the idea of a pyramid bigger than the idea of a 



36 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

fly. The distance between the light-house and 
the channel, seems in the pilot's mind to be 
eight hundred feet; the channel twenty feet 
deep, its course and windings the same as in 
nature, the rocks as lofty, and the islands as 
large. We find a like absence of space in tra- 
cing the progress of light through the humors 
of the eye. The rays cross each other at points 
which have no parts, yet in those points are 
contained images of trees, or mountains, and 
what is still more incomprehensible, the images 
of all objects seen at once, as meadows, streams, 
forests, cattle, houses, rocks and hills of an entire 
landscape, that enter and cross at these points 
at the same instant without confusion, and take 
their true position in the picture behind. Never- 
theless, sensations and ideas must differ among 
themselves, or we could not distinguish objects 
from one another in the external world. Red, 
blue, green, bitter, sweet, hard, soft, cannot make 
identical impressions ; nor can our conceptions of 
vice, virtue, gratitude, ambition, revenge; but 
we know not the nature of the differences, 
though they enter the very sanctuary of the 
soul. We are never more ignorant than when 
we contemplate ourselves; overwhelmed with 
awe, we fall on our knees before that Eternal 
Incomprehensible Being, who created us, and 
whose we are. 



CHAPTER III. 



RESEMBLANCE, COMPARISON, ETC. 

Another cause of association is resemblance, 
which some authors have thought the most 
fruitful source of ideas. The sight of an object 
will often revive the idea of another that resem- 
bles it ; and although the resemblance may not 
be entire, yet it is felt in those parts wherein it 
does exist; and when the resembling object is 
once brought to the mind, it introduces all its 
contiguous associations, so that thought is doubly 
propagated by two laws, resemblance and con- 
tiguity, both of which are necessarily blended 
in this chapter. 

As I walked a street in New Orleans, with 

a Scotch traveler, he saw a little boy whose 

features and dress reminded him of his son in 

Glasgow. He gazed at the child with evident 

emotion, and began to enter into details, when 

the associations were suddenly broken up by a 

line of drays that crossed the street with great 

speed. u Everything in America," said lie, "ife 

4* 



38 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

clone in a hurry; a ship is loaded in New 
Orleans in half the time required in London ; 
the dray is well adapted for rapid execution, it 
is a vehicle not known in the capitals of Europe. 
In London, when a traveller's luggage is too 
heavy to be carried on the top of a cab, he is 
obliged to employ a truck by previous arrange- 
ment. In France, it is conveyed on the back 
of porters ; and in Italy, on the shoulders of 
women." The conversation turned upon these 
subjects and their contiguous associations, until 
we reached the Cathedral, where we saw women 
upon their knees at devotion. He said, "It is 
here as in all Catholic countries, the women are 
devout, while the men enter and depart as spec- 
tators at a show." Here the trains of thought 
ran again into particulars as before. We next 
bent our steps along a range of fruit stalls, where 
his attention was attracted by the quantity and 
size of the native apple. "In Scotland," he 
said, "apples are small and sour; they are bet- 
ter in England and Normandy, but nowhere so 
good and cheap as in the United States; that 
the Spitzenbergs, which he understood grew on 
the banks of the Hudson, were exported to 
England, and bought up for the tables of the 
rich." We next arrived at the flesh and vegeta- 
ble markets, which he declared were unequaled 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 39 

by any similar edifices in Europe, except at 
Liverpool. The meats he thought were inferior, 
but the vegetables better and more abundant 
than in Scotland. We now stood on the banks 
of the Mississippi, in which he saw a resem- 
blance to the Ganges. The conversation then 
turned for a time upon these respective streams, 
the quantity of alluvia deposited by each, the 
culture of rice and the sugar-cane on their banks, 
the points of resemblance gradually fading away, 
until the trains ran into details suggested by the 
laws of contiguity as above. 

However desultory our conversation may 
seem, every change of topic could be traced to 
points of resemblance presented by the objects 
themselves. The features and dress of the 
child, unavoidably reminded the traveller of his 
son, the sight of the dray, the modes of con- 
veyance in the capitals of Europe ; the devotion 
of the women, and indifferences of the men, 
like occurrences in other Catholic churches ; 
the sight of the apples, their qualities and 
growth in Scotland, the appearances of the 
market-houses and river, acted by the same 
law of resemblance, and whenever we dwelt 
upon any particular object, the details were 
invariably suggested by the laws of contiguity 
of time and place. 



40 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

ASSOCIATIONS INDEPENDENT OF THE AVILL. 

What is true of the sight is equally true of 
the other senses ; they, like the eyes, present 
points of resemblance almost every hour we 
live. 

" This fruit/' says one, " has the taste of an 
apple." " This flower," says another, " has the 
odor of a rose;" "that noise," says a third, 
"resembles the crying of a child." It is the 
resemblance and not the will that awakens the 
idea of the resembling object. The will cannot 
act upon what is not perceived. It did not 
intervene between the sight of the boy and the 
traveller's son; nor between the sight of the 
apples and the like fruit of Scotland; or the 
appearance of the Mississippi, and the thought 
of the Ganges. That resembling objects do 
suddenly and unexpectedly revive the ideas of 
one another without effort of the mind, is 
proved by every man's own experience. One 
anecdote often becomes the fruitful parent of 
many. Among western hunters, the first ad- 
venture with a bear brings up another with a 
panther, next with a w r olf, then a deer ; each 
story begetting its like, until the trains insensi- 
bly melt into other associations, or are inter- 
rupted by causes from without. 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 41 

THE MIND PASSIVE, ETC. 
See also Chap. VI 

The mind is as truly passive under what 
enters there from resemblances, as it is under 
sensations of light, sound or touch. When the 
report of distant artillery is compared to thun- 
der, the resemblance is felt from the same ne- 
cessity that the sound itself is heard. 

Hence all similes and metaphors used in 
speech must spring up spontaneously, and never 
by act of the will : for as we cannot create re- 
semblances where none exist, so we cannot 
perceive those that do exist, unless they are 
present to the mind. 

CLASSIFICATION. 

The classification of animals, is the offspring 
of resemblances existing in nature ; it is made 
for us and not by us. We see horses, dogs and 
sheep standing on four feet — nature made the 
resemblances as she did the animals, both of 
which we perceive by the same organ and at 
the same time. 

The resemblances make like impressions upon 
the mind, and like impressions melt into a sin- 
gle thought, expressed by the term quadruped. 
So a green color, whether seen on grass, the 



42 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

leaves of trees, a ribbon, or a thousand other 
objects, are all identified under a single term, 
green. So do metals, flowers, plants and all 
things else, take their position in the mind by 
laws over which we have no control. We can- 
not create resemblances, or classify them for 
ourselves ; they obey their own appointed laws. 

A child having seen one bird, will call all 
others by the same name. They are assimi- 
lated by their resemblances, while their dis- 
crepancies are not felt. Such are the teachings 
of nature who made the birds, gave them wings, 
and ordained those laws which cause their re- 
semblances to flow into one abstract thought. 

And yet writers insist, that we, of our own 
choice, select and embody resemblances among 
objects, rejecting the differences, and thus make 
an artificial classification for ourselves. This 
is a great mistake. We do not select or reject; 
it is the work of nature herself. She associates 
all resemblances in the mind, whether of form, 
color or size, or other properties. Nothing re- 
mains for us to do, but to give them names, and 
even these are not created but suggested by 
etymologies, which are themselves associations 
of elements taken from other languages, rather 
than our own. 



CHAPTER IV. 



CAUSE AND EFFECT. 

Curiosity may be called the hunger and 
thirst of the mind. A desire to know the 
causes of events., and to trace their effects, ad- 
heres to every condition of life. It is mani- 
fested in children at an early period, while 
philosophers have never ceased to push their 
researches into the phenomena of nature and 
the motives of human action, in all ages of the 
world. At the appearance of an epidemic, 
every one is ready to assign a cause ; and after 
the lapse of years of conjecture and toil, physi- 
cians still continue their researches into the 
origin of the cholera. 

A war breaks out between nations — we 
straightway inquire the causes of quarrel, dis- 
cuss, approve, or condemn the motives of the 
parties, deplore the consequent waste of life, 
and all its attendant evils. 

We hear of the explosion of a steamer, or 
conflagration of a city — the causes and extent 



44 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

of mischief done, must be known before curio- 
sity can be appeased. 

Every event, great or small, — a bankruptcy, 
disappointment, success, or death — every change 
in the condition of individuals up to the revolu- 
tions of a State, must have their causes and 
effects, from which new associations propagate 
themselves as light from so many radiant points. 

THE PAST BECOMES THE INTERPRETER OF THE 
FUTURE. 

From the necessities of language, we use the 
terms cause and effect ; but of that power that 
produces the effect, we can have no conception 
whatever. 

Nevertheless the connection between them, 
that is, the order of antecedent and sequence, 
is of momentous concern in the conduct of 
life, since every step we take is both cause 
and effect in an unbroken chain, whose last 
link is death. The past has lost its value, the 
present expires as soon as it exists — we live 
only for the future, and thither are our thoughts 
unavoidably directed. The associations by their 
own movement, extend the past into the future, 
in one continued succession of like causes and 
effects, wants and desires. Hence we are ad- 
monished to build houses, acquire wealth, sow 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 45 

that we may reap ; provide fuel and raiment for 
winter ; instill principles of conduct into chil- 
dren for their guidance in riper years ; enact 
laws for the prevention of crime and abuse of 
power ; and when we look more narrowly into 
our own motives, and the motives of others, we 
still find that all our thoughts, in our humblest 
efforts and loftiest aims ; in all we do or for- 
bear to do ; in whatever scheme or enterprise 
we embark, are continually cast upon the fu- 
ture — as is the journey of a day, so is the en- 
tire march of human life. Could we follow out 
the course of events and reduce their compli- 
cated operations to settled laws, we might be- 
come, in a good degree, masters of our fate. 
But great as our fancied wisdom may be, our 
ignorance is greater still. "We may calculate 
the tides and return of the seasons, the courses 
of the planets and magnitude of the sun, but 
cannot penetrate our own destiny for a single 
day. 

The moral world is as inscrutable as the 
plrysical ; the motives to action are seldom re- 
vealed, except in the act itself; the passions 
overshadow and disturb the judgment ; what is 
true to-day, becomes false to-morrow ; the con- 
flict of opinions can never cease, since the 
opinions themselves must vary with the pro- 



46 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

gress of science, and different constitutions of 
mind. Though we may perceive the connec- 
tion between effects and their causes, that are 
near and obvious, we can never rise to the 
comprehension of the unseen millions at work 
in this ever-teeming earth ! Nothing stands 
still; each moment brings change on rapid 
wing ; we are hurried along as by an impetuous 
tide into positions we could neither foresee nor 
prevent, and whatever may be our lot, we 
seldom do what we intended, or intended what 
we have done. Nevertheless as long as Nature 
is in harmony with herself, we are not wholly 
without a guide : the past becomes the interpre- 
ter of the future ; we unavoidably expect like 
events from like causes, and that the actions 
of men will not vary, where the motives and 
circumstances are the same. 



SCIENCE PROPAGATES ITSELF, ETC. 

Nature is our great teacher, and her means 
of instruction are the association of ideas. All 
true knowledge must be acquired in obedience 
to her established laws. Education may throw 
other ideas into the trains, but they must take 
up their position and derive their value solely 
from the associations they form in the mind. 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 47 

AS IN GEOLOGY. 

In a walk over the fields, we meet with 
rocks split into corresponding parts, and bould- 
ers scattered over the ground ; the thought of 
some inner commotion rises irresistibly to the 
mind, and not of our own effort. The idea is 
confirmed, when we perceive oblique strata 
resting on hill-sides, and masses of granite 
pushed into the summits of mountains. Pre- 
sently organic remains are discovered in the 
upper strata, but none in the granite : hence 
the opinion that granite existed first in the 
order of time. And when these remains are 
found in accumulated masses, our thoughts are 
unavoidably thrown back to a period of creation 
far beyond the supposed era of the world. 
Some of them are of different grades of being, 
while others are of races wholly extinct. Those 
of the lower grades lie at the greatest depths, 
while the incumbent masses rise gradually into 
a more perfect organization, and which were in 
turn, overwhelmed by some unknown catas- 
trophe. New trains of ideas rise at every dis- 
covery, and thus the science of geology, like 
seed cast into the earth, grows by its own laws 
of increase. The geologist creates not a thought 
for himself. His first impressions from objects 
without, are of necessity, and the combinations 



48 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

within, come of the same necessity. Each 
thought enters the associations by its appro- 
priate laws, wherein there is neither chance nor 
choice ; not chance as all agree ; nor choice, 
since the ideas must have taken their position 
before the combinations were perceived. 

SO IN ASTRONOMY. 

A shepherd, while watching his flocks at 
night, perceives differences in the magnitude of 
the stars : that some change place while others 
are at rest. Then comes the astronomer with 
his glass, and discovers what he had not seen 
before, the satellites. Now, the sun presents 
itself in the centre, and the solar system rises 
in all its proportions. Nothing is left to the 
choice of the astronomer : he cannot by any 
effort of thought, associate the satellites of 
Jupiter with Mercury, or the diameter of Sa- 
turn with Venus. His ideas must conform to 
the condition of the objects themselves, and 
this is effected by the laws of association, which 
assign to each impression its proper place in the 
mind. 

OTHER PHENOMENA, ETC. 

Again, boiling water is seen to burst its con- 
finement and expand into steam. This phe- 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 49 

nomenon awakens trains of thought which pre- 
sent, by their own combinations, the various 
forms in which this power may be applied. 
Experiments are accordingly made ; new asso- 
ciations rise in succession, until their just rela- 
tions are perceived, and forth comes the steam 
engine, the material embodiment of thoughts 
suggested by the phenomena themselves. 

Is is said that the falling of an apple from a 
tree, first suggested that great law of attraction, 
by which all bodies descend to the earth, or are 
held at rest on its surface ; by which the tides 
are raised, the moon restrained in its orbit, and 
the planets in their revolutions about the sun. 

Little children were seen to cut and fold 
paper with a bone at a paper mill; the hint 
expanded itself into the paper knife, now in 
universal use. 

Light was seen divided into different rays by 
fragments of broken glass : ideas beget ideas ; 
hence arose our knowledge of colors, of the re- 
fraction of light and the solution of the rainbow. 
The subject, as in all discoveries, propagated 
itself: the mind could only perceive what had 
already entered there. No idea, or combina- 
tion of ideas, could have been anticipated, since 
to anticipate an idea is to have it already in the 
mind. Thoughts come to us, we cannot go to 

5* 



50 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

them. Not a thought is uttered in the parlor, 
street, coffee-house, at the bar, in the pulpit, in 
the prattle of a child, or the grave debates of 
the senate, that is not plainly or covertly the 
offspring of some antecedent, and which in turn 
becomes the parent of other trains that run 
their own course until broken up by some ex- 
traneous cause. 

IDEAS ARE THE OFFSPRING OF OUR WANTS J NEVER OF 
THE WILL. 

If our ideas be independent of the will, do 
they, it may be asked, arise by chance ? I an- 
swer, no; they are the ready slaves of our 
wants and desires, that come uncalled to devise 
the means of relief. 

It is not in our power to think or not to 
think of our wants. They are often so intense 
as to take entire possession of the soul. Rachel 
cried, " Give me children, or else I die ;" and 
Patrick Henry exclaimed, u Give me liberty or 
give me death." 

The thing desired is deemed necessary to our 
happiness, and no man can for a moment divest 
himself of the desire to be happy. However 
capricious his conduct may be in other respects, 
in one thing he is always consistent : in the pur- 
suit of happiness. As soon as any want exists, 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 51 

his thoughts will infallibly hasten like so many 
handmaids, to present the desired object in all 
its relations and dependencies, until it shall 
appear attainable ; or if unattainable, their task 
in either case, being finished, they dissolve and 
depart. 

If, for example, a man's affections are placed 
upon riches, his thoughts are ever busy with 
his subject. If he be a merchant, he fits out 
his ship in imagination, embarks his cargo, fol- 
lows it to its port of destination, sells it to ad- 
vantage, reloads with suitable merchandise, 
sells again at a profit, doubles his fortune by 
another voyage, and then retires in affluence 
and ease to the pleasures of a country life. 

Such, and a hundred other like thoughts, 
spring spontaneously out of any desired object, 
which, like every thing else in the world, must 
have its relations with other objects, and whe- 
ther it be attainable or not, will depend upon 
these relations brought to view by the associa- 
tion of ideas. 

Again : every unsatisfied desire becomes a 
want and a desire to understand a subject; like 
a want of food or water is sure to introduce the 
subject with its kindred associations. The ad- 
vocate who studies a cause, creates nothing for 
himself: ideas come to him, he cannot go to 



52 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

them. He perceives the various phases his 
subject puts on, which he is apt to imagine are 
of his own creation : nevertheless the mind can 
take no part in the production of thought. Its 
activity being derivative, it cannot fall back 
upon its own cause of action. 

Again, when an author, who is engaged in 
committing his ideas to writing, is not pleased 
with the order in which they first rise to his 
mind, he waits for other and further associations 
which his subject is sure to present — this he 
calls thinking, reflecting ; and, when at length 
they come, he inserts them in their proper 
place. Still he is not satisfied, but effaces what 
he had just written, or interlines, or substitutes 
other words or ideas, or inverts their order; or, 
what often happens, remodels a page or chapter, 
and sometimes commits his paper to the flames 
and re-commences upon a new arrangement of 
his thoughts. 

Had he the power, as is supposed, to create 
or command ideas at will, he would not spend 
ten or twenty years in writing a book as some 
authors have done. Virgil might have called 
forth the iEneid, or Thompson his " Seasons," 
by mere act of volition, for there is not an ele- 
mental idea in either poem unknown to a boy 
of sixteen. 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 53 

The combinations only are new, and these 
are spontaneous and progressive, like the growth 
of a plant, slow or rapid, according to the soil in 
which the seeds are sown. Gibbon confesses 
he had spent three days upon a single sentence ; 
and Newton is represented as sitting motionless 
for hours, waiting the approaches of truth, as a 
benighted traveller does the dawning of day. 

GENIUS. 

Genius is said to be "a mysterious, original, 
indefinable power that strikes out a path for 
itself; an energy which collects, combines, ani- 
mates." 

Such a power as is here described, has no 
existence in nature. If we suppose two men 
to stand on a promontory overlooking the sea, 
one of them perceives a resemblance between 
gems buried in its depths and flowers that blos- 
som unseen in the desert; then forthwith comes 
the thought in harmonious measure. 

Full many a gem of purest ray serene, 
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear ; 
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. 

This is genius. 
The other declared he could never endure 



54 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

the sight of the ocean since he suffered from 
sea sickness in crossing from Liverpool. 

This is a common mind. 

Yet neither of them struck out a new path, 
created, collected, combined or animated an idea 
for himself. Both uttered thoughts suggested 
by the same object, just as the same subject 
raises different and varied ideas, accordingly as 
the associations shall act upon different minds. 

Hogarth, Hobbes and Newton, defined genius 
to be hard study. To think, is to perceive the 
forms and combinations of ideas as they rise to 
the mind. Some men possess a nicer suscepti- 
bility to these combinations than others. Genius 
lies in this susceptibility, and not in any power 
it has over its ideas ; for, it must not be for a 
moment forgotten, that ideas come to us by their 
appointed laws, and never at our commands. 

SPONTANEOUS ASSOCIATIONS, VAGAKIES. 

Although our lives are for the most part a 
mere succession of wants and desires, yet there 
are moments when they cease to importune. 
Then it is that our thoughts, freed from all 
restraint, yielding to their own laws of associa- 
tion, possess an activity which every man feels 
to be independent of his will. Ever on the wing, 
they fly from object to object, visiting with equal 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 55 

ease the remote and the near, the great and the 
little, the visible and invisible, with a celerity 
that knows neither time nor space. At one mo- 
ment they are busy with objects of sense, at 
the next with forms of their own creation ; now 
they sport among distant worlds, summon their 
inhabitants before them, question them as to 
their polity, religion, works of art, modes of 
life and death ; in Jupiter, they are giants that 
live ten thousand years; in Mercury, dwarfs 
burnt black by the sun. Now suddenly they 
return to the earth, look into a volcano, the un- 
fathomed seas, trace their subterranean waters 
to the hills, whence come rivers that roll them 
back to the ocean; now they are busy with 
fossil remains, earth is one vast sepulchre : 
" shall we too be overwhelmed in turn, and 
our bones dug up by some higher order of 
beings?" The moon, too, has had its throes; 
its caverns are deeper, and its mountains are 
higher than those of earth ; no atmosphere, no 
inhabitants; still she holds the sceptre of the 
seas, and tides and tempests are the ministers 
of her power. 

Mysterious Providence ! good and evil are 
but modes of existence that entered the original 
plan of creation. Boyle, Leibnitz, John Foster, 
Chalmers : vain are the speculations of man. 



56 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

" What is life ?" Where are our secret chambers 
of thought? All plants are composed of four 
gases ; " all flesh is grass ;" there is no limit to 
the power of steam and fire ; a vessel might be 
constructed long and broad enough to float un- 
agitated on a thousand waves as a house stands 
upon its pillars ; any number of engines might 
be attached to its sides, and an entire colony 
cross the ocean at once. Here the associations 
become more erratic and wild, overleaping the 
boundaries of the Universe into the vast unde- 
fined void, when suddenly a tap at the door or 
the sound of a bell calls them back to the 
realities of life. 

Every one is conscious at times of such like 
trains of thought, called reveries or musings by 
Mr. Locke, and which mean nothing more than 
associations left to their own spontaneous 
motion undisturbed by any extraneous cause. 
The mind is the passive area on which they 
cast their ever-varying forms as clouds their 
shadows beneath: we perceive them and the 
relations they present, and if the connection at 
every transition is not remembered, we are sure 
it did exist, for no one believes that an idea 
ever arose by chance. 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 57 

IMAGINATION. 

Every figure of speech or form of thought 
that enriches the poet's fancy; those wonderful 
stories in the Arabian Nights, and fabulous 
beings in Pagan Mythology; those castles Ave 
raise like mists in the air; those hopes and 
fears that forbode the good or evil to come; 
those gilded prospects of future felicity that 
entertain and delight, are all explained and 
solved by the association of ideas. 

Such a faculty as the imagination has no 
place in the human mind, for it is unphiloso- 
phical to ascribe to a supposed agent the func- 
tions of a power known to exist ; and if there 
were such a faculty as it is described to be, it 
would be a mere expletive, since it could not 
command a thought or any combination of ideas 
not already present to the mind. 

Professor Stewart admits that our ideas are 
so completely " subjected to physical laws, that 
it has been justly observed, we cannot, by any 
effort of the will, call up any one thought. This 
observation, although it has been censured as 
paradoxical, is almost self-evident; for to call 
up a particular thought supposes it already in 
the mind." This sentiment is just; neverthe- 
less, in another part of his work, he ascribes all 
inventions and discoveries in the sciences to 
6 



58 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

the power of the will, and all figures of speech 
to the imagination, which he says/ "selects and 
combines our ideas to form creations of its own." 
It did not occur to the Professor that inven- 
tions and figures of speech, were in the same 
situation with the ideas that compose them; 
since to call up a particular form or combina- 
tion of thoughts, supposes it already in the 
mind ; and to call up what is already in the 
mind, is a mere absurdity. 



CHAPTER V. 



ATTENTION. 



The Professor is equally at fault in his at- 
tempt to show the influence of the mind over 
its trains of thought. If it be true, as he 
affirms, that we possess the power of singling 
out any thought at pleasure, or of detaining it 
and making it a particular object of attention, 
then our ideas, when once in the mind, would 
not be subject to physical laws as he affirms, 
but to a law imposed by the will, so that a 
man might please himself in the selection and 
detention of his thoughts, as in the choice of 
the furniture of his house, or the cut and color 
of a garment. 

But the facts are otherwise. Ideas cannot 
be separated nor viewed singly, but always in 
connection with one another as are the objects 
they represent. When we contemplate the face 
of an absent friend, his features appear in their 
natural combination. If w T e could single out 
and consider any one of them separately as the 



60 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

eye, the resemblance would vanish and our 
subject would be abstractedly • the eye: but 
here again a combination would appear as be- 
fore ; for the eye is only known by its form, 
coats, humors, iris, various colors and pro- 
perties. Or if we consider one of its parts only, 
as the crystaline lens, immediately its form, po- 
sition, and power to concentrate light rise to 
the mind. Or if our subject be simplified to a 
mere sensation, as a green color ; here again 
the combination exists, for something must be 
green — a field of wheat, the foliage of a tree, or 
some other object, whose form, magnitude, and 
other properties would enter the picture and 
become themselves new centres of association. 

We cannot detain any thought, or fix the at- 
tention at will. A traveller perceives without 
emotion, the succession of objects that rise to 
view ; but at the sight of a volcano, his steps 
are stayed, and his attention fixed. It is not 
the will, but the nature of the object that de- 
tains his thoughts, and his attention is measured 
by the degree of interest it excites. The at- 
tention of a child is riveted to an elephant, 
while a dog makes no impression. A little 
girl sees nothing but the pretty doll at the win- 
dow, while her brother is wholly taken up with 
the little man and his drum. A merchant 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 61 

glances carelessly over the motley columns of a 
newspaper ; presently he falls upon a paragraph 
announcing the loss of his ship — his thoughts 
are suddenly arrested, and his mind shut to 
every object of sight or sound. He does not 
perceive a servant enter or depart ; nor does 
he hear the prattle of his children ; his own 
name pronounced, or the clock strike in the 
same apartment. This is no mystery. Every 
one has felt a like abstraction in himself. The 
attention cannot be divided ; it may be diverted 
in rapid succession, but can never keep pace 
with the manifold objects with which the senses 
are perpetually assailed. Its capacity is limited ; 
when wholly occupied by one subject, there is 
no room for another — a cup that is full can 
hold no more. 

It is with ideas as with sensation ; while one 
sensation acts, it prevails over all others. 

The flavor of an orange excludes that of an 
apple : each dish on the table takes its turn, 
and every one knows how difficult it is to over- 
come the taste of a nauseous drug. Great pain 
renders us insensible to less : in the agonies of 
the toothache, w r e do not feel the bite of an in- 
sect ; and a violent emotion, whether of joy or 
sorrow, makes us, while it lasts, unconscious of 
any other. 

6* 



62 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

But philosophers treat attention as a problem, 
which they endeavor to solve by supposing 
that the clock was not heard in the above in- 
stance, from the want of attention, which they 
affirm to be a voluntary act, forgetting that it 
must be heard before the attention could be 
aroused, when the voluntary act would come 
too late. The hearing must be antecedent to 
the attention, otherwise we might attend to a 
sound before it was heard, which would be 
quite as unintelligible as seeing an object be- 
fore it was visible. 

Although the attention be measured by the 
interest felt in any object, yet it may be ex- 
cited by an object indifferent in itself, when 
connected with some other that concerns us : 
as where an advocate defends a cause for the 
sake of a reward, or a school boy applies him- 
self to his hateful task from fear of punish- 
ment. 

The power to detain any thought at will, 
implies the power to exclude at the same time 
all other thoughts from the mind ; so that sor- 
row or remorse, which gives no pain but in 
thought, would cease to trouble, whenever the 
sufferer chose to detain other subjects in their 
stead. But this theory is contradicted by the 
universal experience of mankind. Ideas cannot 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 63 

be made to stand still. They enter the mind 
from causes beyond our control, and depart 
with a celerity that no effort can retard. In 
their rapid flight they impart knowledge by 
sudden impression, as objects in the dark are 
seen by flashes of light; and however pro- 
tracted the investigation of any subject may 
be, the perception of truth is always instan- 
taneous ; so that if all the moments really 
spent in the reception of knowledge could be 
measured, they would occupy but a small in- 
definable portion of time. 

The fatigue of study does not arise from 
voluntary effort, but from the continued suc- 
cession of images that overtax the perceptive 
powers, as the eye is fatigued by the over ac- 
tion of light : and as the light acts upon the 
passive eye, and not the eye upon the light, so 
the forms of thought act upon the passive mind, 
and not the mind upon the thought. 



CHAPTER VI. 



MEMORY. 



Remembering, which is defined to be the re- 
vival of ideas that have passed out of the mind, 
is better understood from experience, than from 
any definition in words. 

Ideas are not revived by any effort of the 
mind, which, as has been repeatedly shown, 
can have no power over ideas, not present to 
its perception. Remembering, must be, there- 
fore, explained by some other process, and this 
is none other than the association of ideas. 

Like features in a stranger, will instantly 
and unavoidably revive in us the remembrance 
of a deceased friend, his form, dress, manners 
and conversation ; the causes and effects of his 
sudden death, the varied vicissitudes of his 
life, public and private, back to the early scenes 
of our youthful sports together. 

We know of our own consciousness, that the 
revival was purely the effect of the resemblance, 
and that every other idea in the train followed 



66 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

by its own laws of association, independently 
of the will. 

Again : a lady in a stage coach which had 
stopped for a relay of horses, asked for water. 
At the sight of the servant who presented it, 
she burst into tears, fell back upon her seat 
and refused to drink. When she became com- 
posed, a passenger inquired into the causes of 
her sudden grief; she replied, that the servant 
who brought the water, had been the nurse of 
her child that died eight months ago. The 
mystery was solved; the appearance of the 
nurse revived, of necessity, the remembrance 
of her dying child, and all the sorrows of that 
melancholy scene. 

To remember or to forget, is not as we 
please. The guilty do not remember their 
crimes, nor can they forget them, at pleasure. 
To remember is at once their discipline and 
their punishment, from which there is no es- 
cape. They may traverse sea and land, scale 
walls and mountains, still the unwelcome 
thought follows up its blows, often more terri- 
ble than the rack. 

That memory is independent of the will, is 
confessed by the usages of society, which forbid 
the mentioning any subject that may cause 
painful remembrances in the minds of others. 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 67 

The most ignorant, although they never heard 
of the association of ideas, never allude to any 
misfortune or crime by which one of the com- 1 
pany had suffered. 

Nevertheless, most writers insist that we re- 
member by voluntary act : of this opinion is 
Dr. Abercrombie, a late author, who re-affirms 
the prevailing notion upon the subject. He 
says, " We remember facts, and can also recall 
them into the mind at pleasure; we call up 
facts by a voluntary effort, by directing the 
mind into particular trains of thought, calcu- 
lated to lead to those which we are in search 
of." 

To say we can remember a forgotten fact at 
pleasure, is simply an absurdity; for what pow- 
er have we over a fact not present to the mind? 
or how can we perceive the tendency of parti- 
cular trains of thought to lead to the discovery 
of a fact when the thoughts themselves are un- 
perceived ? If we could call up one absent or 
forgotten idea, we might a thousand — nay, all 
that we had ever known of history, ancient or 
modern, of philosophy or science ; all that we 
had ever read, heard, seen or thought, might, 
by voluntary effort, be instantaneously revived 
in the mind. 

We are, on the contrary, often disconcerted 



68 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

at meeting with a friend, whose name we had 
forgotten. The usual civilities pass between 
„ us, while our air and manner betray our em- 
barrassments, which perceiving he turns away, 
not less mortified than ourselves. From this 
dilemma we would gladly escape, but we can- 
not ; the will can do nothing for us ; uneasy at 
our situation, we take some one aside and ask 
his name ; as soon as it is pronounced, the bur- 
then is removed, and we are relieved. 

Now, what took place in the mind ? The an- 
swer is easy. The sight of his features recalled 
the times and places of our first meeting in a 
steamer, his manners, dress and conversation — 
also our second meeting at the hotel, and after- 
wards at a private dinner, where we were in- 
troduced by name. In like manner, the fea- 
tures of other persons present, revived the 
associations peculiar to each, otherwise we 
could not have known them apart, or distin- 
guished the members of our own families from 
strangers. The desire to remember the forgot- 
ten name, like the desire to understand any 
subject, continued to renew the associations 
connected with it, again and again, as long as 
the desire remained unsatisfied; and if the 
name itself was not revived, it was because its 
impression, like a feeble link in a chain, was 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 69 

too weak to sustain the connection : while on 
the contrary the names of the other guests, 
being more deeply impressed, were instantane- 
ously and irresistibly revived at sight. 

Again : instantly a traveller discovers he had 
lost his purse, its form, color, texture and con- 
tents ; the times, places and circumstances con- 
nected with it, pass in rapid review before his 
mind. He pauses, as he says, "to reflect," 
" to try to think what he had done with it," 
" to remember where he had it last," imagining 
that he voluntarily sends out his ideas in search 
of it, whereas it is the idea of the purse itself 
that revives the circumstances connected with 
it, just as the thought of a ship, a house, tree 
or child, or of any other object, would of neces- 
sity bring up the associations peculiar to each. 
If the trains lead to the discovery of the purse, 
desire is satisfied, and the subject departs ; if 
not, anxiety will infallibly bring up the circum- 
stances again and again, with the different asso- 
ciations at each return, in the same way that 
the interest we take in any subject, will con- 
tinue to exhibit it, in its different aspects, until 
desire be satisfied, or cease from some other 
cause. 

This is the philosophy of facts, and if it be 
a true account of the process of remembering, 
7 



70 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

it is as unreasonable to search for any other, 
as for other inlets of light and sound, than the 
eye or ear. The error lies in confounding will 
and desire, which are totally different in their 
natures. A man may have daily a hundred 
desires without a single act of the will. 

He may desire a change in the weather, a 
favorable wind, the restoration of his health, or 
the arrival of a friend, but he never wills either. 
Desire explains the recurrence of the idea of 
the object lost with its associated circumstances, 
but the will is never disturbed until the disco- 
very is made, and then only does action begin. 
The will obeys ideas, and not ideas the will. 
If ideas were under the control of the will, so 
would our opinions be, for they are made up of 
ideas, which we might select at pleasure, as an 
apothecary compounds a dose or a painter his 
colors : or we might dispose of the old stock of 
notions at wholesale, and provide ourselves with 
another set, as we furnish out our houses in the 
newest style. 

If we were possessed of such power as is 
alleged over our ideas, every man would be the 
maker of his own happiness. He would not 
suffer his peace to be disturbed by the fore- 
bodings of evil, the remembrance of misfortune 
or remorse for crime. That we have such pow- 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 71 

er, is the romance of metaphysics. He who 
gave us our being, has annexed thereto immu- 
table laws of thought, that bring joy or sorrow 
to the mind, as the sun brightens, or clouds ob- 
scure the heavens. 

THE MIND PASSIVE. 

The mind is essentially passive in every as- 
pect in which it can be viewed. Sensations of 
light, heat, sound, taste, pleasure or pain, act 
upon us, and not we upon them. 

The passions act upon the mind as the word 
imports, and not the mind upon the passions. 
Hope, fear, ambition, hatred, pity, remorse, 
sorrow, love, keep us in almost perpetual agi- 
tation, waste our frames, and sometimes drive 
us to acts of violence and self-destruction. An 
argument that overthrows one opinion and es- 
tablishes another in its stead, acts upon the 
mind, and not the mind upon the argument. 

Even our spontaneous trains of thought do 
often, by their own movement, reveal unexpect- 
ed truths, that throw us back upon our steps, 
and give a new direction to the principles and 
conduct of life. 

We have proofs within ourselves of the pas- 
sive nature of the mind in the approaches of 
sleep. As our ideas begin to fade, perception 



72 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

gradually declines and expires under the total 
absence of thought. The mind now reposes 
from the excitement caused by both sensation 
and ideas : we are no longer conscious of ex- 
istence ; time ceases to run, and the extremes 
of wakefulness meet without space between 
them. During the interval of rest, it retains 
its excitability, as does the optic nerve in the 
absence of light. Both are aroused into activ- 
ity at the return of their exciting causes, the 
mind to perception and the eye to vision. 
Sound sleep is the total absence of thought, as 
vision ceases in the absence of light. 

That the mind should act without the pre- 
sence of sensations or ideas, is impossible ; and 
if its activity be caused by sensation or ideas, 
then sensation and ideas must precede the first 
movement of the mind, and such is the fact, 
for every one is conscious of the presence of 
sensation or ideas before action begins. 

Sensations come of objects from without, and 
ideas from sensations, and thus the mind de- 
rives thought and activity from sources inde- 
pendent of itself. 

That there can be no motion in mind or mat- 
ter without antecedent cause, is the voice of 
universal nature, and he who contends for a 
self-moving power within himself, is bound to 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 73 

show when, how, or on what occasion, and what 
achievements it performed without the presence 
of either sensation or thought. 

REASONING. 

To think, reason, judge and determine, is to 
perceive the forms and relations of ideas as 
they rise to the mind; nothing more. This 
will appear manifest if we follow out the pro- 
cesses of thought on any given subject; as for 
example, whether or not a representative be 
bound to obey the instructions of his constitu- 
ents ? 

The question w r ill of itself infallibly suggest 
trains of thought like the following : Commu- 
nities being too numerous to legislate in a body, 
meet by appointment to choose an agent to act 
in their stead. The whole scene passes in review 
before us; we see the assembled multitude — 
the judges of election seated at the ballot-box 
— Ave hear the interrogatories put to the voters 
as they come — the contest w^axes warm — the 
parties are alternately elate and despondent — 
the hour has elapsed — the polls are closed — the 
votes are counted, and the victor proclaimed — 
he takes his seat in the legislative chamber. 

His constituents instruct him to cause a road 
to be run through the centre of the population, 

7* 



74 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

and a bridge erected to connect its termination 
with a neighboring town. As this is a matter 
in which they best understand their own in- 
terest, his rule of conduct springs spontaneously 
out of the facts — ex factu oritur lex — as lawyers 
say; and he yields a ready obedience. 

Next comes the project of a law, based upon 
facts of which his constituents can have no 
knowledge whatever. Here it is plain he must 
act from his own convictions, such as arise of 
themselves out of the facts and circumstances 
before him. These being changed, his convic- 
tions, which are but the perceptions of the re- 
lations of ideas, must change also; each case 
furnishes its own solution. 

But if a Senator be instructed to vote against 
a treaty of peace, advantageous to the nation, 
but hurtful to the local interests of his con- 
stituents — how shall he act ? Must he obey in- 
structions ? On this point there will ever be two 
opinions, the necessary result of the same facts 
acting upon different minds. 

Uniformity of opinions is as impossible as uni- 
formity of taste for food. No man's opinions 
are in his power ; if they were, he might shut 
up his senses against impressions from without, 
or he might refuse to perceive the reasons of 
things or ideas ; or to think at all, £tnd thus re- 



ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 75 

duce the mind to a blank, as Locke supposes it 
to be before sensation begins. On the contrary, 
nature teaches her children, as she upholds their 
being, by her own appointed laws, without their 
agency or consent. She has her alphabet, her 
grammar and syntax ; and he who can be made 
to observe and understand her modes of instruc- 
tion, that man, whether ploughman or philo- 
sopher, is a metaphysician indeed. 

I shall not inquire whether there be any other 
causes of association, and if any, whether they 
might not be resolved into the three treated 
above. 

My chief aim has been to show, that the 
mind is passive until aroused by sensations and 
ideas ; that ideas obey their own laws of mo- 
tion independently of the will ; and that from 
the forms and relations they present, arise all 
phenomena of mind, all the knowledge Ave pos- 
sess, and every emotion of the soul. 

Whether my position be true or not, is a mere 
question of fact which every one may ascertain 
for himself. Let him who doubts call up the idea 
of Cato or Washington, before he is conscious 
of the presence of either in his mind ; or try to 
form an image or figure of speech that does not 
spontaneously spring out of his subject, and he 
will find that the existence of ideas consist 



76 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 

wholly in their being perceived ; and being per- 
ceived, must have been in the mind before the 
attempt was made. 

I may have insisted too much upon certain 
propositions too plain to be denied. Neverthe- 
less, most authors write, and all men act, as if 
they believed their ideas were at command, or 
of their own creation ; an error which has hither- 
to proved fatal to the progress of true philo- 
sophy. 

Lawyers would be better qualified than other 
men for researches into the mind, were they 
not too much cramped by the details of the pro- 
fession ever to rise to a just comprehension of 
the subject. 

The trial of every cause is an illustration of 
the laws of thought. The facts suggest the 
mode of attack, which in turn suggest the means 
of defence ; ideas beget ideas ; the struggle is 
maintained by new associations that come like 
fresh troops in the heat of battle — an idea un- 
expectedly aroused in the progress of debate, 
has often proved fatal to a cause, and as often 
has a thought occurred too late, that might have 
been equally decisive, had it been at command. 

Judges themselves often pronounce upon ideas 
that had not occurred to either counsel ; and if 
an appeal lie to a dozen tribunals, the decision 



ASSOCIAITON OF IDEAS. 77 

might be as many times modified or reversed, 
since the same trains of thought might not oc- 
cur to the same counsel, or might act differently 
upon the understandings of the judges ; or new 
associations might arise to the same minds by 
that eternal law that impels all things forward 
in mind as in matter. 

The elements of knowledge will continue to 
vary their combinations through all time to 
come ; future judges will infallibly think differ- 
ently from their predecessors ; other opinions 
will prevail in law, which, like creeds in re- 
ligion and philosophy, will take their hue from 
the genius of every succeeding age. 



THE WILL 



THE WILL, 



CHAPTER VII. 

The disputants on both sides of the question 
of liberty and necessity, agree that the will is 
the immediate spring of action. On one side 
they say it is made to act by previous motive 
or determination of the mind; while on the 
other, they affirm it acts independently of mo- 
tive or of any influence outside of itself. Upon 
this point the controversy has turned for more 
than twenty centuries. Nevertheless, the so- 
lution of the question, when rightly understood, 
is so easy, that it is in danger of being rejected 
from its very simplicity. 

Whether we possess within ourselves such 
an agent as the will is said to be, by either 
party, can only be known from our own con- 
sciousness, and if that does not testify to its 
existence, it is a fiction to be found only in 
books. 

Authors do not agree in their definitions of 
8 



82 THE WILL. 

the will, each fixing its meaning for himself, and 
putting all others in the wrong. The ablest on 
the side of necessity, and one of the most accom- 
plished logicians of any age, is Jonathan Ed- 
wards, and yet his definition is altogether 
vague and at variance with itself. 

He says, " The will is that by which the mind 
chooses anything — the faculty of the will is 
that power or principle of the mind by which 
it is capable of choosing — an act of the will is 
the same as an act of choosing or choice — the 
very act of volition itself, is doubtless a deter- 
mination of the mind; i. e., it is the mind draw- 
ing a conclusion, on coming to a choice between 
two or more things proposed." 

Having settled upon this definition, he pro- 
ceeds to show that volition or choice is deter- 
mined by " that motive, which, as it stands in 
the view of the understanding, is the strongest. 
Motive is something that is extant in the view 
or apprehension of the understanding or per- 
ceiving faculty — the strongest motive is that 
which has the greatest degree of previous ten- 
dency to excite volition." This he resolves 
into the " greatest apparent good," and adds, 
" That to appear good to the mind, as I use the 
phrase, is the same as to appear pleasing or 
agreeable to the mind." 



THE WILL. 83 

That the will is determined by the strongest 
motive, and is always as the greatest apparent 
good, is often repeated and made the basis of 
his entire treatise on the freedom of the will. 

When, therefore, several objects are present- 
ed to President Edwards for choice, a half 
dozen different treatises, for example, on as- 
tronomy, he examines them respectively, and 
the mode in which the subject is treated by 
Woodhouse, his profound researches, illustrated 
by diagrams, the paper, type and binding, de- 
termine his judgment in its favor, being the ne- 
cessary effect of the evidence presented by the 
object itself; and thus it turns out, that choice 
arises of necessity, since the mind could not 
judge otherwise than as it did. And yet 
among the vulgar, and too often among the 
educated, choice implies the power to adapt 
the mind to the nature of things, whereas it 
only indicates the manner in which the things 
themselves act upon the mind. 

Such is the necessity of Edwards — that vo- 
lition or choice is the necessary effect of mo- 
tive, that is of the greatest apparent good. 
But as motives vary continually with every 
change of judgment, opinion, belief, desire or 
want, his necessity is simply a corresponding 
volition, followed by doing what pleases us 



84 THE WILL. 

most at the time ; whereas physical necessity is 
that unchangeable law that governs the opera- 
tions of matter; wherein there is neither mo- 
tive, appetite or volition ; nevertheless it has 
been the fate of this great philosopher to be 
misunderstood or misrepresented by inferior 
minds, who seek to make capital for themselves, 
by raising an outcry against him for opinions 
he never entertained. 

Cousin. 

Cousin places choice or preference upon the 
same basis with Edwards. He says, " That to 
prefer is to judge definitively, to conclude ; for 
it is not the will of man to judge that such or 
such a motive is preferable ; we are not masters 
of our own preferences ; we judge in this respect 
according to our intellectual natures, w r hich has 
its necessary laws, without having the con- 
sciousness of being able to judge otherwise 
than as we do ; for it is evident the different 
motives for or against, apply to and govern the 
intellect, which is not free to judge indifferent- 
ly, this or the opposite." 

Bielfield. 

This writer affirms that " The understanding 
examines and presents all objects to the will, 



THE WILL. 85 

and according as that presents them, this ac- 
cepts or rejects, for the will has not absolutely 
the power of examining and judging : its sole 
quality is that of determining. It is the judg- 
ment that errs and the will that embraces the 
errors; for if the will could freely determine 
either for good or bad, it must have the faculty 
of reasoning, comprehending and examining, 
which is the business of the judgment — the 
will at all times will follow the judgment as its 
guide." 

Locke. 

Of the same opinion is Mr. Locke, who says 
that the " only object of the will, is some action 
of ours, nothing more; for we producing nothing 
by our willing, but some action in our power, 
it is there the will terminates and reaches no 
farther. It is not a fault, but a perfection in 
our nature, to desire, will and act according to 
the best result of a fair examination. A mans 
will in every determination, follows his own 
judgment." 

Malebranche. 

This writer on the contrary, affirms, that it 
is the province of the will alone to reason, and 
of the understanding to perceive, but has not 

8* 



86 THE WILL. 

informed us how the will can reason without 
perceiving, or how the understanding can per- 
ceive without reasoning, since to reason is but 
to perceive the relations of ideas ; nothing more. 

Reid, Clarke, Holies. 

Dr. Reid thinks " that the last determination 
of the mind is another term for the will." Dr. 
Clarke says, that the last dictate of the under- 
standing is not different from the will, while 
Hobbes before them had said, "the will is the 
last act of deliberation." 

Gall says, motives must be compared, weighed 
and judged; the decision resulting from this 
operation is called the "Will." Spurzheim, fol- 
lowing in his footsteps, affirms "that the will is 
the decision of the understanding." 

Dr. Brown says that action follows immedi- 
ately upon desire, and declares he is never con- 
scious of such a power as the will. And even 
Edwards himself identifies the will with the 
affections of love, hatred, the passions and emo- 
tions, which he thinks are only certain modes 
of the exercise of the will. Payne and Young 
are inclined to the same opinion. 

Hume. 

This philosopher, in his Treatise on Human 



THE WILL. 87 

Nature, defines this faculty thus: "I desire it 
may be observed, that by the will, I mean nothing 
but the internal power we feel and are conscious 
of, when we knowingly give rise to any new mo- 
tion of our body, or new perception to the mind." 

By a new perception, the author could not 
have meant a simple idea derived through the 
senses, otherwise the blind might have a know- 
ledge of colors they had not seen, and the deaf 
of sounds they had not heard. 

He must have intended that the will could 
originate new combinations of ideas, indepen- 
dently of those laws of association he so hap- 
pily defines. If such were his meaning, then 
all discoveries in the arts might have been made 
in the beginning, and those to be made hereafter, 
might be forthwith brought to light, merely by 
an effort of the will. But it is now admitted 
by all the best authors, that the mind cannot 
originate an idea or combination of ideas for 
itself; nay, that this undefinable will cannot 
even help the memory to the forgotten name of 
a friend, unless it be aroused from some cause 
without, or brought into the mind in its appro- 
priate trains of associated ideas. 

As we become possessed of simple ideas from 
necessity, so are all their combinations formed 
independently of the will. 



88 THE WILL. 

When for example, any complex idea, as of a 
ship, is present to the mind, how came it there ? 
were its simple elements put together at that 
instant, before the word ship conld be pro- 
nounced ? If so, the component elements must 
have been put together according to a form or 
mental image of a ship pre-existing in the mind ; 
but if the image or form pre-existed there, then 
the combination came too late, and the image or 
form of the ship must have come from another 
source, which could be none other than the asso- 
ciation of ideas. 

Aime Martin. 

This writer, in his Treatise on Education, has 
revived the Manichean doctrine of two wills in 
the same man, one spiritual and the other ma- 
terial, that contend for supremacy whenever a 
choice is to be made. 

Lorsque les deux volontes se rencontrent, il y 
a lutte; et alors, suivant que Tune ou 1'autre 
l'emporte, vous voyez apparaitre Epaminondas 
ou Cesar, Socrate ou Sylla, Washington ou Bona- 
parte, la sagesse ou 1' ambition, avec toutes leur 
suites. Lorsque la volonte de Tame est la plus 
forte, elle fait servir les facultes de l'intelligence 
a son triomphe; et lorsqu au contraire, la volonte 
animale a le dessus, toutes les facultes de Tame 
s'cffacent en leur obeissant. 



THE WILL. 89 

M. Cousin , again. 

But no writer has had such a struggle with 
his will as M. Cousin : every effort at definition 
has but increased his perplexity. He first iden- 
tifies it with attention. " Now, what is atten- 
tion ? it is not the reaction of the organs against 
the impressions received ; it is nothing else than 
the will itself; for, nobody is attentive without 
willing to be so, and attention at last resolves 
itself into the will." 

It next becomes the foundation of conscious- 
ness. "The first event of which we have a 
consciousness is volition." It is next made the 
measure of time. "Now a moment is nothing 
else in itself but a single act of the will." 

It is then made the test of existence and 
personal identity. "It is will then attested by 
consciousness, which suggests to us the convic- 
tion of our existence, and it is the continuity of 
the will, attested by memory, which suggests 
to us the conviction of our personal identity." 

Having shown the will to be any and every- 
thing, he proceeds to display its powers. 

" The moment we take a resolution to do an 
action, Ave take it with a consciousness of being 
able to take a contrary resolution. Sec then 
a new element which must not be confounded 
with the former ; this element is the will ; this 



90 THE WILL. 

cause, in order to produce its effect, has need 
of no other theatre, no other instrument than 
itself. It produces directly without interme- 
diate, and without condition, continues, consum- 
mates, or suspends and modifies, creates it 
entire or annihilates ; and at the moment it 
exerts itself in any special act, we are con- 
scious it might exert itself in a special act 
totally contrary, without any obstacle, without 
being thereby exhausted ; so that, after having 
changed its acts an hundred times, the faculty 
remains integrally the same, inexhaustible and 
identical, amid the perpetual variety of its appli- 
cations, being always able to do what it does 
not, and able not to do what it does. Here 
then, in all its plenitude, is the characteristic 
of liberty !" 

A disciple of M. Cousin, late a Professor in 
an American University, gives a still more start- 
ling account of the will. He says, " The will is 
a cause contingent and free — is first cause itself. 
Acts of the will neither require nor admit of 
antecedent causes to explain their action. What 
moves the will to go in the direction of reason ? 
Nothing moves it — it is cause per se. It goes 
in that direction, because it has power to go in 
that direction. What moves the will to go in 
the direction of the sensitivity ? Nothing moves 



THE WILL. 91 

it — it is cause per $e. It goes in that direction, 
because it has power to go in that direction. 
It is a power that is indifferent to the agreeable- 
ness or disagreeableness of objects; distinct from 
reason, it is not conviction or belief.'' 

What, it may be asked, moves the professor, 
who is an eminent divine to pray or preach? 
Nothing moves him to pray or preach ; his will 
moves itself; he prays and preaches because he 
is able to pray and preach. What moved him 
to take his text in 17th of John the Evangelist ? 
Nothing moved him to take his text in 17th of 
John the Evangelist ; his will moves per se, and 
admits no cause of action outside of itself. What 
moves him to eat when hungry, or to drink when 
thirsty ? Nothing moves him to eat when hun- 
gry or to drink when thirsty ; his will neither 
requires nor admits of an antecedent, and unless 
it moves of its own accord, remains fixed forever. 

So when he snatches his child from the flames, 
he is not moved by love or pity; his will moves 
per se, and if it happened to move at that critical 
juncture, it was a contingency that might not 
happen again in a thousand years. 

There is no end to the absurdities uttered 
about this incomprehensible will. It becomes 
more unintelligible, the more that is said about 
it. The word is so inwrought into our language, 



92 THE WILL. 

that it could not be torn away without endanger- 
ing the entire fabric. It is pronounced or writ- 
ten every hour of every day, yet no man knows 
what he means by it, though he thinks it a part 
of himself. 

Ask a ploughman what it is, and his definition, 
if any he can give, will be quite as intelligible as 
any found in the books. Ask a metaphysician, 
and he will define it by writing a treatise on Lib- 
erty and Necessity, which the next author will 
declare to be absurd and inconsistent with itself. 

They who say the will is a self-determining 
power, are bound to specify what actions it has 
performed under such conditions. But when 
pressed for facts, they retreat behind their own 
consciousness, as an enthusiast strikes his breast 
for proof of inspiration. In the meanwhile their 
own conduct furnishes the best refutation of 
their opinions. They engage in the acquisition 
of wealth, power and fame, w T ith the same steadi- 
ness of purpose as the rest of mankind, are actu- 
ated by all the passions and emotions of our 
common natures, fear, hope, love, revenge, ma- 
lice. They laugh and weep from the same causes, 
are aroused by insult and make battle in defence 
of their persons. They adjudge the actions of 
others, and are themselves adjudged as good or 
bad, virtuous or vicious, wise or foolish, by those 



THE WILL. 93 

very motives which they affirm have no influ- 
ence over their conduct. 

The necessarians, on the other hand, declare 
the will cannot budge unless actuated by mo- 
tives; that motives move the will to move the 
man. But why not let the motive, as the word 
implies, move the man directly without an inter- 
mediate agent? Action would then follow in 
a straight line, which is always the shortest 
distance between two points. Whereas, it is 
a most clumsy contrivance for one faculty of 
the mind to act through another faculty of the 
mind; for the judgment to call upon the will to 
execute its decrees, to slay an enemy or walk 
a mile. Nature never employs two causes for 
one effect ; on the contrary, she produces many 
and varied effects from a single cause. The 
tongue serves for speech, taste, ingestion and 
deglutition, and the hand for purposes almost 
without end. The fall of bodies, motion of fluids, 
fluxes of the tides, come of gravitation alone. 
Heat warms our blood, cooks our food, melts 
brass, expands the air, raises clouds, reanimates 
plants, clothes them with leaves, and the earth 
with verdure. Sir Isaac Newton has said, " More 
causes of natural things are not to be admitted 
than are necessary to explain the phenomena, 
for nature is simple and does nothing in vain." 
9 



94 THE WILL. 

The Doctrine of the Weaker Motive, Free Will- 
ere, &c. 

There is yet another class of writers who 
affect a middle course, and insist that the will 
can choose the weaker of two motives, or the 
least eligible of any number of objects pre- 
sented for choice. They, like their kindred 
free-willers, are conscious of such a power with- 
in themselves, and thus cut short all further 
inquiry into the matter. They confine the 
power of choosing exclusively to the will; and 
yet, say they, the will is merely the faculty by 
w T hich the mind chooses. If it be the mind that 
chooses, the stronger motive must prevail ; for 
it is a contradiction to say the power of choosing 
can choose against its choice. If, from the 
stronger motive, a man choose to go to church, 
it is inconceivable how he can at the same time 
choose to go to the ale-house from the weaker 
motive. But if his will can choose the weaker 
motive, and send him to the ale-house against 
the choice of his mind, then the will acts inde- 
pendently of motive. Driven to this dilemma, 
these reasoners put motive at defiance, and cut 
us adrift from the affections of the soul, and 
the convictions of reason. 

What a tyrant is this will in the little king- 
dom over which it is appointed to preside ! 



THE WILL. 95 

In this age of reform and march of philoso- 
phy, let us hope that its oppressed subjects, 
reason, judgment, conviction, belief, will rise in 
their might, overthrow the senseless monster 
and establish a government of their own. 

Choice, a judgment , &c. 

According to every view that has been taken 
of the subject, the power that decides must ex- 
amine and compare motives and objects before 
a choice can be made. Hence, if the will be 
that power, it must reason out each case for 
itself, and act from its own determination, and 
that it may be duly honored in the dignity to 
which it is raised, the Freewillers endue it with 
a sort of personality, by calling it the " self," 
the " I," the u me," the " man," making it an 
automaton, which, like a steam engine, has the 
faculty of moving at the same time, and under 
the same circumstances, in a direction contrary 
to that in which it actually moves. The advo- 
cates for the weaker motive embrace the same 
opinion, with this slight difference, that their 
will can act against motive, while that of the 
Freewillers is indifferent to motive altogether. 

That men could have acted otherwise than 
as they did under the same inducements, is a 
delusion that has been often explained. Other 



96 THE WILL. 

thoughts afterwards enter the mind, that would 
have varied the judgment under which they 
acted ; then they are ready to say, " If it were 
to do again, they would act differently" — " had 
they known the vessel leaked, they would not 
have embarked"—" had they known that Titus 
had been convicted of robbery, they would not 
have intrusted him with money." So complete 
is the delusion, that when disappointment 
comes, they never cease to regret that they 
had not acted under a knowledge of facts, of 
which they were totally ignorant. 

Every man 'knows that he could have done 
the contrary of what he actually did, under a 
contrary influence. When he shaves himself, 
he is conscious of the power to cut his own 
throat, had he the motive to do so : and there 
is an even chance that he would do it, if his 
will were to choose the weaker motive, or were 
a self-determining power that acted per se : nor 
would his chance be much better if shaved by 
a Freewiller, whose will might impel him to 
commit murder, for which he would certainly 
be hanged if tried by a court of necessarians 
who hold that guilt lies in the motive and not 
the will. 



THE WILL. 97 

Trial and defence of the guilty Barler. 
And now to test, practically, the doctrines of 
the Freewillers, let us imagine that a barber of 
their own school had actually cut the throat of 
his neighbor from motives of jealousy or other 
wicked intent : that he was brought to trial 
before a court of . Freewillers who believed in 
the "I" and the "me," and having pleaded not 
guilty, let us hear what his advocate has to say 
in his defence. 

Address to the Court. 

u This case, may it please your honors, is not 
" so much a question of law, as of metaphysics, 
" since laws can have no binding force, unless 
u adapted to the nature of the human mind. 

u The accused, like every body else in the 
u world, has a will of his own, that presides over 
* the faculties of both body and mind. It is a 
u power that acts per se, and does not admit of 
" motive or antecedent ; is indifferent to the 
u right or the wrong, to the convictions of reason 
" or emotions of the soul. Its power is unlimited 
" in the sphere of the inner man. It can confer 
" importance on trifles, clothe error in the garb 
" of truth, give strength to the weaker motive, 
" and deprive the stronger of its force. It acts 
u in all directions from itself as a centre, and is 

9* 



98 THE WILL. 

always able to do, at the same time and under 
the same circumstances, the contrary of what 
it actually does. It is prone to evil rather 
than to good ; for by its power over motive, 
it seduced Adam to prefer the taste of an 
apple to the preservation of life, and the hap- 
piness of the whole human race. 
" With respect to the manner in which, the 
will exerts its power, learned authors do not 
agree. Some suppose it places the smaller 
motive in such close juxtaposition to the per- 
ceptive faculties, that the larger motive is kept 
out of sight, as a straw near the pupil of the 
eye, will shut out the image of an oak. It is 
in this way that the great John Locke affirms, 
that the mind is deceived by a present unea- 
siness, however slight, and diverted from per- 
ceiving a greater and more distant evil, until 
it comes with power to destroy. 
u This reasoning is not at all affected by de- 
fining the will to be the faculty by which the 
mind chooses : for if it be the mind that chooses 
the weaker motive, then the mind chooses 
against its own choice, which is simply an ab- 
surdity. The weakness or strength of a motive 
is measured by the power it exerts over the 
will, and not the mind ; and since the will can 
always choose the least eligible of objects, a 



THE WILL. 99 

thousand motives can have no influence upon 
its choice. This fact fully identifies the 
weaker motive men with the Freewillers. 
" Whatever difficulties may have arisen about 
the choice of motives, they must vanish, if, as 
a late author insists, that two or more motives 
cannot exist at the same time. ' For,' says he, 
6 between two pieces of gold of equal value, a 
man will tell you, he does not care which he 
takes. But if one piece be worth ten shillings 
and the other nine, then a motive arises : there 
are not two motives, nine shillings on one side 
and ten on the other ; there is but one, the ex- 
cess of the value of one piece over the other. 
If no motive stir a man, he will sit still ; and 
when thirst drives him in search of water, he 
has but one motive, not two, the one to go in 
search of water, and the other to sit still : for 
a motive being that which moves, a man can 
hardly be said to be moved to sit still. If the 
motive be as ten to go by land, and two to go 
by water ; the less is merged into the greater, 
as the light of the stars in the beams of the 
sun: and as we then perceive but one lumina- 
ry, so we feel but one motive, the difference 
between ten and two. While we deliberate 
upon the two modes of travelling, various judg- 
ments may arise, each excluding the other in 



100 THE WILL. 

turn, until all doubts terminate in conviction, 
which is now the sole motive to action, that 
exists only because all others cease to exist/ 
u 6 When, in the opinion of the jury, the ac- 
cused is innocent, they have but one motive 
for their verdict, not two, the one to acquit 
and the other to convict ; and if they convict 
whom they believe to be innocent, then it is 
plain, that neither his innocence *©r guilt was 
their motive of conduct, but some other, as 
personal dislike or policy of state.' 
"But it matters not whether there be but 
one or an hundred motives, since they are all 
under the power of the will, (the Court nodded 
assent.) This great and sublime truth, wrought 
out by the labor of twenty centuries, now lies 
at the bottom of all true metaphysics. But 
men are slow to believe the truth, and too 
proud to learn. There are yet writers of no 
mean reputation, who insist that every action 
is prompted by motive, some bodily want or 
mental affection; and that the nature of the 
motive is known by the action, as a tree by 
its fruit. 

" I do not deny that good or bad motives may 
co-exist with good or bad actions ; but I deny 
that their natures can be inferred from the 
actions themselves. (The Court again nodded 



THE WILL. 101 

" assent) When a thief is detected hiding 
u stolen goods, or a highwayman concealing the 
" body of the deceased ; or when the cashier of 
" a bank runs away with its money ; or where 
" a man is caught setting fire to a town, he is 
" straightway consigned to the penitentiary or 
" the gallows as for a crime ; for, saith the law r 
" and its stupid interpreters, guilt lies in the 
u motive or intent with which an act is done. 
u How absurd, since motives cannot reach the 
" will, the sole spring of action ; quite the con- 
f* trary, the sovereign will can act backwards 
" upon motives, and demolish a thousand of 
" them at a blow. It would be as reasonable 
" to determine upon a man's guilt by the protu- 
u berances of his skull, as by guessing at mo- 
" tives, which can never be known. 

" It is high time that learned professors were 
" appointed to our universities, and legislators 
" instructed in the doctrines of the will, that 
" their criminal codes might be adapted to the 
" true nature of man. 

"Having thus got rid altogether of those 
" troublesome motives, the question next arises, 
" what disturbs the will when in a state of re- 
" pose ? It is affirmed by one class of writers, 
" that the mind is the cause of volition, others 
" say there is no cause of volition ; but that the 
" will determines itself, or is a self-determining 



102 THE WILL. 

" power. Others again insist, that since it is 
" above the influence of motive, it is not deter- 
" mined at all, not even by its own determina- 
" tions, but is itself, simply the c determiner/ 
" But this does not remove the difficulty ; for, 
u although motives may have no influence in 
" themselves, it is nevertheless unaccountable 
" how the determiner can begin to move, without 
" some inducement ab aliunde. Hence the advo- 
" cates of this system have been obliged to admit, 
" that the determiner is occasionally prompted 
" to certain specific actions in order to gratify the 
" wants of the inner man. For example, one 
" might perish from hunger or thirst, unless the 
" determiner came to his aid ; or he might be de- 
" stroyed by an enemy unless the determiner 
" enabled him to fight, and thus involve itself in 
" the same common catastrophe. So that a mo- 
" tive of self-preservation inherent in the deter- 
u miner itself, may explain its activity in such 
" emergency. 

" But in the absence of all necessity, the de- 
" terminer is free to compare, collate, examine, 
" and weigh with an even hand, the objects and 
" motives that sue for a preference, and to form 
" its own determinations as independently of 
" them all, as if it resided in the moon, where 
" Furioso found his wits. 

" But the philosophers of this school differ as 



THE WILL. 103 

u to the manner in which the determiner dis- 
u covers the wants and affections of the man. 

" One party insists that it is by an instinct 
u per se; another, that it is by sympathy; others, 
" that it is by an established harmony; and there 
" is still another party that insists it is by its 
"juxtaposition to the affections, as people living 
" under the same roof are apt to find out what 
" is going on in the adjoining apartments. 

" There is another difficulty of more serious 
" moment — as there can be no action without the 
" determination of the determiner, how comes it 
" to pass, that the determiner always takes sides 
" with the wants and appetites of the man ? 
u This question, which involves the influence of 
" motives, is now being discussed with such heat 
u and rancour that there is danger that the whole 
" doctrine of the determiner may tumble to 
" pieces. 

" However, this question may be settled, I 
" care not. Whether the will be a distinct power 
" or identical with the determiner, as Dr. Greg- 
" ory supposes, I affirm without fear of contradic- 
" tion, that it is beyond the reach of motive. — 
ff Upon this rock I plant my foot (and raising his 
u voice to its utmost pitch) and I defy Hobbes, 
" Reid, Clarke, Stewart, nay, I defy the great 
" Edwards himself, who has laid all his oppo- 



104 THE WILL. 

" nents bleeding at his feet, to drive me from my 
" position. — {Great and continued applause.) 

" The will, may it please your honors, is the 
u element of both good and evil, stronger for evil 
" than for good. It has usurped the moral gov- 
" ernment of the world, and now holds an undi- 
" vided sway over the entire race of man. It 
" cannot be moved by argument or entreaty, re- 
u sisted or eluded. Hate, malice, revenge, am- 
a bition, these are the ministers of its power. It 
" pulls down and builds up at pleasure — war and 
" revolution are its pastime, and {raising his 
" clenched fists, exclaimed) it has reddened the 
" earth with the blood of her children, and 
" glutted the grave with untimely slaughter ! 
" {Applause.) 

" Vain are the instructions of parents, schools, 
" academies, colleges ! truly may it have repented 
u the Creator that he made man. No motive of 
" piety, fear, love or hatred, nor even the visita- 
" tions of the Holy Spirit can reach its iron heart. 
" To ascribe action to motive is a vulgar error, 
" that has misled all but the true believers. 

" A mother weeps at the death of her child — 
u her grief is an instrument in the hands of the 
u will with which it opens the sources of tears. 
" A man starts back at a precipice or a serpent 
" in his path. It is the will working upon his 



THE WILL. 105 

" fears, and not his fears upon his will. Nor 
u does he who commits suicide wish to die : no, 
" it is the will itself that has grown weary of 
" the insatiate wants and appetites that knock 
" perpetually at its door. 

u The precise form of the will cannot be 
" known. It has neither body nor soul. It is a 
" simple entity sui generis. Nor has it any fixed 
" abode, as the spirit-rappings have gone far to 
H prove. In whatever part of the body it enters, 
H it immediately becomes a locomotive. {The 
" Court assented) If it enter the stomach, a man 
" straightway eats and drinks. If it enter the 
" blood, he is parched with a fever; if the heart, 
" the passions blow a gale ; and when it enters 
" weak minds, it dictates all those unintelligible 
" crudities written about itself. 

"But truth is great and must prevail: let 
" justice be done. If the will like all other 
" tyrants, has done much harm in the world, it 
" has also done some good. When enlisted on 
" the side of Virtue, it enables just men to carry 
" their motives into effect ; to establish whole- 
" some laws, schools and colleges, to provide for 
ft their families, rear up and educate pious chil- 
" dren ; to set examples of truth and justice by 
" which society is upheld. Such has ever been 
" the course of my client's life, until the 25th of 
10 



106 THE WILL. 

" June, 1853, his will suddenly turned its back 
" upon the best of men, and by diverting the 
" razor from its lawful uses, life fled in issues of 
" blood." 

Here the orator closed his defence and took 
his seat. The homicide having been admitted, 
the Court declined hearing any testimony or 
argument impeaching the motive or intent of 
the accused. 

The Chief Justice, a stout, able-bodied man 
of a most imperturbable will, then proceeded to 
charge the jury, and to deliver the unanimous 
opinion of his brother judges. 

" Gentlemen of the Jury : — To the able and 
" learned defence of the counsel of the accused, 
" I have but little to add. 

"All things in nature, except the will, are 
" actuated by their appropriate laws, while the 
" will itself acts without any cause of action 
" whatever. It is in man what fire and steam 
" are to an engine — a locomotive power that acts 
" per se, and does not admit of any interference 
" outside of itself. It is the "I" and the "Me" 
" that pervades and upholds both soul and body. 
" When, therefore, a man commits what the law 
" calls a crime, shall he be hanged for an act 
" to which his understanding never assented ? 
" This is an absurdity peculiar to the necessa- 



THE WILL. 107 

" rians, who punish for actions to which men are 
" driven by irresistible necessity. On the other 
" hand, the freewillers are consistent with thein- 
" selves. They would punish the will could it be 
" reached, and not the man. But let us not des- 
" pair ; here, as in medicine, the disease is half 
" cured when its cause is known. The sources 
" of crime are now laid bare by the school to 
" which we have the happiness to belong. Meta- 
u physics is on the march, man is hastening to 
" perfection. The spirit-rappings have proved 
" that the will, the sole author of every crime, 
" can be made to know its proper place — to obey 
" and not to govern. If it can be forced back 
" from another world, there is no reason why it 
" should not be reduced to subjection in this. 
" When this happy period arrives, Ave shall see 
" mankind emerge as from troubled dreams, into 
" a broader and brighter life. 

" Justice and good faith will then prevail over 
" the earth; laws, lawgivers and judges, with all 
" their enginery of racks, gibbets, and dungeons, 
" will vanish before the dignity of regenerated 
" man." {Long-continued applause.) 

As soon as order w r as restored, the impatient 
jury rendered a verdict of acquittal without leav- 
ing the box. The barber was discharged and 
borne aw r ay on the shoulders of the multitude. 



108 THE WILL. 

He was innocent, and the judgment cor- 
rect, unless we deny the existence of such a 
power as the freewillers describe the will to be. 
Both they and the necessarians affirm volition 
to be the immediate antecedent to bodily action ; 
but what causes the will itself to act, whether 
anything or nothing, is a point they can never 
settle among themselves. In the meanwhile 
the freewillers insist that if the barber acted 
from necessity, a tribunal of necessarians would 
be equally bound to acquit him, since there 
could be no responsibility where there was no 
freedom of action. But that no such conse- 
quences would arise, will, I trust, be hereafter 
seen when we come to treat of crimes and pun- 
ishments under their proper head. 

VOLITION, CHOICE, FACULTY. 

President Edwards insists, that, " The very 
act of volition is doubtless a determination of 
the mind drawing up a conclusion on coming to 
a choice." 

If choice lie in the determination of the mind, 
it can lie no where else. But when he affirms 
that " an act of the will is the same as an act 
of choice," the will becomes an agent able to 
choose, and is so treated throughout his entire 
work, leaving us in doubt, whether he places 



THE WILL. 109 

choice in the determination of the mind, or 
separate act of the will. If in the determina- 
tion of the mind, why does he labor to show 
that choice is the effect, of the strongest motive 
acting upon the will ? The subject is thus ren- 
dered unintelligible, and often contradictory in 
itself, by ascribing choice, to what he affirms to 
be merely a faculty of something else. The 
mind possesses the faculty of perceiving light 
and sound : or of remembering and reasoning. 
It is not the faculty, that perceives light or 
sound, remembers or reasons; it is the mind 
itself. If a specific faculty be necessary for a 
choice, a specific faculty must be equally neces- 
sary, for thinking, remembering, reasoning, 
loving, hating, and performing all and every 
operation of the mind. 

Specific faculties must be equally necessary 
for the respective bodily actions. A man must 
dance, walk and sing, breathe and swallow, by 
each appropriate faculty. He may with the 
same propriety, be called a bundle of faculties, 
as he is a bundle of habits. By this logic, the 
horse neighs by his neighing faculty, the dog 
barks by his barking faculty, the bird flies by 
its flying faculty, and the cock crows, by its 
crowing faculty. 

A like form of speech, is often extended to 
10* 



110 THE WILL. 

inanimate objects, as that the magnet has the 
faculty to attract iron, fire the faculty to melt 
gold, or expand water into vapor. All this 
array of the faculties of the mind, when stripped 
of an overcharge of words, means nothing more, 
than that the mind chooses, the mind thinks, 
the mind remembers, the mind reasons. 

Though metaphysicians speak of the will as 
a faculty, or an attribute, yet they do, in effect, 
create it into an entity or real being, that can, 
of its own determination, choose between mo- 
tives or objects, or else is determined in its 
choice, by some antecedent cause. What else 
can they mean, when they say the will is free — 
that it is determined by the strongest motive — 
that it can choose the weaker between two mo- 
tives, or the least eligible of objects — that it is the 
determiner — that it acts per se — that it neither 
requires^or admits of cause of action — that it is 
cause itself— that it is the "I," the * Me," the 
" Man," and while one distinguished writer 
affirms that it is the only power that reasons, 
another insists, that it is the understanding that 
reasons, and the will that adopts its errors. 

These and an hundred other absurdities, have 
been heaped upon a subject in itself simple and 
not above the capacity of a lad sixteen years of 
age. 



THE WILL. Ill 

Mr. Locke, who warns us, that by the faculty 
of the will, he means nothing more than a mode 
of thinking, and that choice is a determination 
of the mind, straightway relapses into the com- 
mon error, and ascribes choice to the will, which 
both he and Edwards treat as a real Being, actu- 
ated by certain influences made to bear upon it. 
Had these philosophers been as good as their 
word, and left choice where they had placed it, 
in the convictions of the mind, their philosophy 
had occupied a position from which it could not 
be expelled. But having converted an attribute 
into an agent, they have made liberty and ne- 
cessity to consist in explaining the uses and 
functions of an imaginary being, that cannot be 
defined, or shown to have any existence in 
nature. Edwards has rendered the subject 
still more obscure, by identifying the will with 
the affections, so that we know not where he 
intends the first movement shall begin, whether 
in the determinations of the mind, the acts of 
the will, or affections of the soul. 

If there were really such an agent or power, 
as the will is made to be, every man would 
know it from his own consciousness, and not 
from what he was told by metaphysicians, who, 
not being able to conceive, how thought could 
arouse to action, have contrived an intervening 



112 THE WILL. 

agent, which renders the subject more unintelli- 
gible, since it is easier to conceive that thought 
should act immediately of itself, than that it 
should move the will, to move the man. 

Writers deceive themselves when they say 
that by the will they mean nothing more than 
a mere faculty or attribute of the mind, and not 
an agent; for they cannot utter or write a sen- 
tence upon the subject of liberty and necessity, 
without assigning to the will a real and sepa- 
rate existence with a determining power over 
every action of the body or thought of the mind. 

If this be denied by the necessarians, it can 
not be denied by those who ascribe to the will 
the sole power of choice, and place it above the 
influence of all motives whatever. 

THE TRUE CAUSES OF ACTION, THE WILL, ETC. 

I once thought and spoke of the will as other 
men, supposing that it acted of itself, or from 
antecedent causes. But when I observed how 
writers contradicted themselves and one an- 
other, that they could give no intelligible defi- 
nition of the agent they labored to describe, I 
grew weary of their philosophy, began to doubt 
the existence of the will itself, and to search 
for the true causes of action in my own mind, 
and the minds of others. 



THE WILL. 113 

I did not remain long in doubt ; for when I 
reflected that nothing but sensations and ideas 
could enter the mind, the truth broke upon me 
as a new and sudden light, that no other causes 
of action could possibly exist. Here the pre- 
judices of education rallied to the combat. 
Could I part from my will the sole power of 
locomotion, and sit forever motionless, like a 
stock or stone? The struggle was desperate. 
The truth at last prevailed, and lo ! the will 
turned out to be simply another name for the 
power exerted over the mind by sensations and 
ideas. As these or their combinations were 
strong or weak, external action did or did not 
take place. The riddle was solved. 

I saw r every one around me pursuing his ob- 
ject as I did mine, under the same impulses 
which he called free-will, free-agency, or doing 
as he pleased. And when I asked him why he 
did thus and thus, he invariably assigned some 
desire or bodily want ; some idea, judgment, or 
belief, all resolvable into sensations and ideas, 
as the sole cause of action. The explanation 
was just ; he could give no other, for none other 
existed. 

The question of liberty and necessity turns 
upon facts that lie within the comprehension of 
the humblest capacity. The simple language 



114 THE WILL. 

of the ploughman, is abundantly copious to ex- 
plain all that can be known upon the subject. 

Every one perceives or feels what he pre- 
fers. This is the only motive power, and not 
what is called the will, that fifth wheel to the 
coach, which has kept it turning round and 
round in the same circle more than eighteen 
hundred years. 

SENSATIONS, CAUSES OF ACTION. 

Every one has felt the power of sensations, 
both painful and pleasant. They who insist that 
the mind is an ever active principle, must never- 
theless admit with Mr. Locke, that it is passive 
towards all sensations before they are perceived, 
as when we start at a sudden flash of lightning, 
the explosion of a gun, or from an unexpected 
blow or burn ; no one can doubt that both mind 
and body are aroused from a passive into an ac- 
tive state by the sensation alone. This is confess- 
ed by all metaphysicians, who say such actions 
are involuntary ; that is, independent of the will. 

Again : when a sensation is slightly painful, 
a man will often sit still from indolence, or the 
fear of disturbing others. Pain being the mo- 
tive power, like all other power, when too 
weak, cannot produce its effect. But as it in- 
creases, he will feel a growing tendency to mo- 



THE WILL. 115 

tion, and when intense, it will urge him with 
an overpowering force. Here his own con- 
sciousness testifies to the sole and real cause of 
action, its beginning, progress, and end. 

In like manner thirst, in its first approaches, 
is barely felt ; but when it becomes excessive, a 
man would not doubt that it sent him in search 
of water, were he not told that he could not 
budge without the consent of a power within 
him, called by different names ; sometimes the 
will, at others an attribute, then the determiner; 
at other times, the " self," the "me," the "I," 
the " man," and by one philosopher, the greatest 
of them all, it is said to be merely a mode of 
thinking, so that he might perish from thirst, 
were the cup not handed him by that faculty, 
attribute, entity, called the will, whose functions 
and uses no one has been able to understand 
or define. 

Among sensations, the strongest is always 
the motive power. A traveller in Morocco 
saw five malefactors suspended on a wall by 
hooks thrust under the ribs. Three were al- 
ready dead ; the remaining two cried incessantly 
— " water, water." 

IDEAS, CAUSES OF ACTION. 

As sensations do of themselves excite to 



116 THE WILL. 

action, so do mere ideas or thoughts in cases 
wherein it is not pretended, the will could take 
any part. 

In our most quiet moods, they rise to the 
surface and betray the workings of the inner 
man : we are by turns sad, soothed, gay, in- 
flamed, blush or grow pale by the mere power 
of thought. We are convulsed with laughter 
at a flash of wit: eyes, mouth, nose, chin, 
cheeks, all partake of the perturbation, but 
instantly react at the sight of distress. The 
anxieties of politicians, the forebodings of evil, 
remorse, mortification, hope disappointed, prey 
upon the health and waste away the frame. 
The first convulsive movement in a camp-meet- 
ing becomes the parent of a second ; the idea 
exists, and the effect follows. Boerhaave threat- 
ened to burn with hot iron the next man in his 
hospital taken with the St. Vitus' dance; the 
thought of the punishment prevented the recur- 
rence of the evil. 

Van Swieten relates of himself, that he passed 
near a dead dog that had burst from putrefac- 
tion. The stench caused him to vomit ; three 
years thereafter he passed the same spot, when 
the recollection of the offensive object made him 
vomit again. A blacksmith at his anvil was 
told he had drawn twenty thousand pounds in a 



THE WILL. 117 

lottery; the hammer fell from his hand, and he 
became a maniac for life. The news of a sud- 
den calamity will often overthrow reason as 
effectually, as the fracture of the skull from a 
blow on the head. 

A candidate hears of his election to office, 
the idea explains his emotions of joy. Every 
one knows how bitterly he has suffered from 
the apprehension of evils that never happened. 
A merchant falls into despair at the supposed 
loss of his ship, which soon arrives to restore 
his tranquillity of mind. An officer under the 
Duke of Alva, was told to prepare for death the 
next morning. During the night his hair be- 
came perfectly white. It turned out to be a 
mere pleasantry, in retaliation for a similar jest, 
played off by him upon a brother officer. A 
child will shed tears at a story of fictitious woe, 
and the rudest natures will surrender to emo- 
tions of pity at the complicated miseries of a 
tragic scene. The bereft mother weeps at the 
thought of her departed child ; when the idea 
is not present, she ceases to weep. Hence sor- 
row is cured by change of place, which gives 
entrance to other ideas that take possession of 
the mind. 

To forget the causes of sorrow and to have 
none, are truly said to be the same thing. 
11 



118 THE WILL. 

Among ideas as among sensations, the strong- 
est is sure to prevail, and not unfrequently bodily 
pain is overcome by mental excitement, or a 
single thought j as where a soldier forgets his 
wounds in the heat of battle ; or as Philip of 
Spain, who died of erysipelas, brought on by 
sitting too near the fire, from which he thought 
it undignified to be removed, except by his 
chamberlain, who happened to be absent; 

In these, and an hundred other instances, 
which will not fail to suggest themselves, every 
one is conscious that sensations and thought 
are the sole causes of action, and not the will, 
of whose existence he has no evidence within 
himself. 

If a single sensation or idea can produce such 
effects, how much greater must be their power 
when embodied into choice, motive, judgment, 
opinion or belief, or any other form or combina- 
tion of ideas. 

choice, etc. — Continued. 

Nothing more is meant by choice than an 
agreeable impression made upon the mind by 
objects acting through the senses, or from infor- 
mation derived from other sources. 

Through the senses, as where the host inquires 
of his guests what they choose for their repasts ? 



THE WILL. 119 

One replies beef, another mutton, and a third 
fish ; the reply of each simply discloses the dish 
most agreeable to his sense of taste. 

Its agreeableness constitutes his choice ; the 
mind determines nothing for itself; it cannot 
vary the sensation from what nature made it. 

Choice for different fruits, apples, pears or 
peaches, is indicated by the external action. It 
lies in a sensation made agreeable by appoint- 
ment of nature ; not by act of the will ; and yet 
metaphysicians say, "the will is the faculty by 
which the mind chooses anything." 

Choice in its nature, implies what is most 
agreeable. 

To say, therefore, that a man may choose 
what is disagreeable or painful, is a perversion 
of language. He may endure what is disagree- 
able or painful ; he may swallow aloes, or un- 
dergo an amputation — but his choice is not 
the aloes nor the amputation; they are only 
the means for attaining the good proposed. 

So choice may lie in the perception or belief 
of the greatest apparent good, wherein the will 
can take no part whatever, as where a traveller 
deliberates whether he shall go by land or 
water ; he is told that the trip by water is ren- 
dered delightful by the rich and varied scenery 
on the shores, and distant mountains crowned 
with snow. 



120 THE WILL. 

These ideas make an impression upon his 
mind, and not his mind upon the ideas : they 
exert an influence in making up his opinion of 
the journey by water. He is also told, that 
the steamer is new, spacious and fitted with 
every convenience and luxury. 

These details add strength to the impression. 

On the other hand, he is • told the channel 
lies part of the way, among pointed rocks, that 
had proved destructive to life, in high winds 
and adverse tides. Here the idea of danger 
acts upon his mind, and takes its place in the 
effect about to be produced. 

What he is told, affects him by the same ne- 
cessity that the objects themselves would, were 
they present. His mind is the passive reci- 
pient of what was not known before, and his 
conviction is the aggregate of each impression 
made up for him, and not by him. 

He is now informed that the conveyance by 
railway is more safe and rapid than by steamer, 
but is over a barren, unsightly plain, dusty and 
disagreeably hot in summer. Each fact makes 
its impression as before, and the aggregate is 
his opinion of the journey by land. 

Here are two modes of conveyance, the one 
safe and the other dangerous ; the lives of the 
traveller's family being at stake, the idea of 



THE WILL. 121 

safety prevailed by its own energy ; it consti- 
tuted his choice, and he took his departure by 
land accordingly. 

If it be said that the will took cognizance of 
the facts, and made the choice of itself; this is 
an absurdity that requires no refutation. Or 
if it be said that the mind made the choice by 
its faculty, the will, and that it could have 
chosen the opposite, this is another absurdity, 
for it dissolves the connection between the 
mind and its own conviction, and takes from it 
the only inducement to action. What then 
was the disturbing force that put the traveller 
on the journey by land ? 

If still it be insisted that it was the will that 
could have decided either way, then is the will 
an independent being, that thinks, reasons, acts 
and determines for itself. 

Such is the dilemma into which they fall, 
who make the will choose independently of the 
mind, or who make the mind choose by its 
faculty, the will. 

What then did really take place in the tra- 
veller's mind? Let us hear him; for when 
asked why he did not take his family at less 
expense and trouble, by water, he replied, be- 
cause he thought it safer to go by land. His 
explanation was just : the idea or belief of 

11* 



122 THE WILL. 

safety constituted his choice, and was the sole 
motive power. But if the will were above the 
influence of motives, it were folly, according to 
the Freewillers, to take information of the 
routes, and a fool would in all cases act as 
rationally as a wise man. The traveller's ac- 
count of himself is a practical illustration of 
free agency in its most perfect form. 

He did what pleased him most ; the idea of 
safety pleased him most ; it was his choice, and 
the sole motive power that set him forward on 
his journey by land. 

The choice was made for him, and not by 
him ; it was the effect of information which he 
had no power to vary. But if he had gone by 
water against his convictions, it would have 
been under some stronger motive ; such as that 
he hoped to meet on board a debtor who pro- 
mised to pay him money ; or lastly, if he were 
a Freewiller, he might, from the pride of sys- 
tem, risk his life among the rocks, to show that 
he had power over motives, and not motives 
over him. 

That choice among objects is the prevailing 
impression made by one object over the rest, 
is the experience of every man every day he 
lives. If a variety of cloaks, be shown to a 
purchaser, and the impression made by the 



THE WILL. 123 

qualities of the brown cloak, please him most ; 
that impression is his choice ; none others can 
be made. 

His mind is the passive recipient of what 
enters there ; it cannot make an impression 
upon itself. It has no power to render the 
same object black or white, agreeable or disa- 
greeable : that depends upon the properties of 
the object itself, its color, form and texture. 
Hence, choice is an effect, whose cause resides 
beyond our reach in the object itself. When, 
therefore, a Freewiller affects to choose the 
least eligible of objects by the mere power of 
the will, he acts from some motive or antece- 
dent cause, known to himself, if not disclosed 
to others — as when he declaims against intem- 
perance as a vice, while abstaining himself from 
wine and rich sauces, from a secret apprehen- 
sion of disease. Or where a miser, from mo- 
tives of avarice, prevailed upon his son to 
espouse the rich hunch-back, instead of the 
beautiful but dowerless virgin; and when his 
illiterate neighbors expressed their surprise at 
the event, his solution of the enigma was ready 
and learned — " My son has a will of his own 
that acts per se, chooses contingently, and of 
its own spontaneity; admits of no influence 
ab extra, and being itself first cause, its choice 
was without motive." 



124 THE WILL. 

Whoever denies that he acts from motives, 
makes a mockery of his understanding, and will 
certainly have his candor or veracity called in 
question. 

choice. — Continued. 

Let us trace the progress of choice in another 
traveller, from the first thought to its final 
result. 

A gentleman, intending to cross the seas with 
his family, inspected several steamers about to 
depart. 

The berths in the Canada were wide, but the 
apartments narrow and scantily furnished ; one 
impression favorable and one unfavorable. Again, 
the main deck was continually wet from the 
great weight of the timbers in front; another 
unfavorable impression. Again, the accommoda- 
tions in the saloon were good, but the smell of 
the bilge-water pervaded the entire ship, and 
her commander was said to be reserved, distant 
and uninformed. One favorable and two unfavor- 
able impressions ; so that the amount stands, three 
favorable and six unfavorable impressions. 

It is plain that each impression, whether of 
sensation or idea, was felt of necessity, and that 
the aggregate was his opinion of the Canada, 
which he had no power to order otherwise than 
as it was. 



THE WILL. 125 

He next inspected the Arctic, where every 
similar object made favorable impressions, ex- 
cept that he was told that the vessel, however 
elegant and agreeable, was not as substantial 
and safe as the Asia, w r hich he now visited in 
turn. Here he was again offended by the smell 
of bilge-water, and narrowness of the berths ; 
but found the saloon neat and well furnished, 
and her commander an agreeable, well-informed 
officer, and particularly attentive to ladies. 

This last trait in the captain settled the ques- 
tion with the ladies of his family, and he took 
passage in the Asia, in compliance with their 
request and his own judgment of the best. His 
preference was the unavoidable effect of what 
he perceived and heard. 

He could not convert the smell of the bilge- 
water into a sweet savor, nor vary the combined 
impressions under which he acted. He w^as not 
master of his choice; that was the necessary 
effect of evidence acting upon his mind, as vision 
is of light upon the eye. And by whatever 
name w^e call that effect, judgment, choice, 
opinion or belief; and whether they be the 
same or different, they were nothing more nor 
less than the aggregate of sensations and ideas 
that acted upon him, and not he upon them. 



126 THE WILL. 

BELIEF, OPINION, &C. 

Nothing can be more absurd than the notions 
entertained by the masses of mankind upon the 
subject of opinion or belief. Everybody is 
ready to say, "I have a right to my own 
opinion." "I will think and believe what I 
please." And there are not w T anting ministers 
of the gospel, who declare from the pulpit, that 
their hearers have the power to believe any 
creed they are told to embrace. It does no 
honor to the profession that such men should 
be appointed teachers of religious truth ; they 
would kindle anew the flames of persecution, 
were it not for the restraints of the law and 
the tribunals of public opinion. If belief be in 
our power, why do they preach and write on 
the evidences of Revelation, or why are wit- 
nesses heard in courts of justice ? 

Men are prone to dislike each other merely 
from difference of opinion ; and yet it is plain, 
that every opinion is the necessary effect of 
evidence derived from facts, or the circumstan- 
ces in which a man happens to be placed. 

A physician finds his patient suffering under 
an acute pain in the side, great thirst, tongue 
white, pulse frequent, hard and contracted ; 
each symptom makes its proper impression on 
his passive mind, and the aggregate is his opin- 



THE WILL. 127 

ion of the disease — it is the pleurisy — can he 
believe it to be the gout ? 

In the progress of a trial at court, the opinion 
of the judges arises unavoidably from the facts 
and the law acting upon them, and not they 
upon the facts and the law, which they did not 
make and cannot vary. 

We hear debates in the Senate, and go away 
convinced. We are not the authors of our con- 
viction ; it is the effect of the speaker s argu- 
ment. The passive mind takes the impression 
as wax the form of the seal. The fluctuations 
of opinion we feel towards different sides of the 
question under debate, are the varied impres- 
sions each speaker makes in turn. Some facts 
are new, some we doubt ; one argument we say 
is weak, another strong; that is to say, facts and 
arguments act upon us, and not we upon them ; 
and, when finally an opinion is formed, let no 
man suppose he made it for himself; it is as 
plainly an effect as sound from the ringing of 
a bell, or sweetness from sugar on the tongue. 

New ideas upon a subject, are like new light 
shed upon an object before obscurely seen. 

When a disbeliever is convinced of his error, 
his conviction is the effect of facts and argu- 
ments that now act upon him for the first time. 

The minds of a jury are in a passive state 



128 THE WILL. 

until the witnesses speak. Their belief is an 
effect ? the testimony, the cause or antecedent. 

Demonstrations in geometry , when under- 
stood, force truths upon the mind to which it 
was before passive, because ignorant. 

If opinions were in our power, no principle 
in religion or philosophy could endure for a day. 
The moral, like the physical world, would be 
turned upside down every twenty-four hours. 

The astronomer might, at pleasure, believe 
in the system of Newton, or of anybody else ; 
or, that the world stood upon a tortoise, as the 
inhabitants of Celebes say. All distinctions of 
right and wrong, friend and foe, debtor and 
creditor, parent and child, would be borne away 
by the overwhelming power of the will. 

Fortunately for mankind they are not per- 
mitted to bring such calamities upon themselves. 
Nothing is left to caprice or chance ; not a sen- 
sation, thought, opinion or imagination; every 
idea, every emotion that impels and governs the 
soul, comes of laws appointed by Him who gave 
us this mysterious being we hold. 

TRUTH, BELIEF, &C. 

Eighteen hundred years ago Pilate asked 
what is truth? The question remains unan- 
swered to this day. 



THE WILL. 129 

Dictionaries define it to be "the conformity 
of our ideas to the reality of things. But as 
the reality of things can only be known from 
the ideas themselves, this definition amounts to 
nothing. 

That the sun revolved about the earth, was 
true for many centuries ; but now it is true that 
the earth revolves about the sun. 

Color was once inherent in objects, next in 
light, and is now a mere sensation in ourselves. 

Among the great variety of Christian sects, 
each deems itself possessed exclusively of the 
truth. The Papists find the flesh and blood of 
Christ in the Eucharist ; the Protestants, simply 
bread and wine. So that, when a Protestant 
turns Catholic, or a Catholic Protestant, truth 
changes sides. 

Wkh nine jurymen it lies in the guilt of the 
accused ; with the remaining three in his inno- 
cence. 

It is synonymous with belief, for no one can 
believe what does not appear to be true. 

Truth, therefore, must vary with the ideas of 
which it consists, with the nature and strength 
of evidence and the minds that receive it. 
Hence the ever-varying aspect under which it 
is pursued by all mankind. 

I do not contend with those who say there 
12 



130 THE WILL. 

are permanent universal truths, as in the rela- 
tions of numbers, &c. I affirm only that truth 
is to every man necessarily what it appears to 
be — the effect of evidence acting upon his mind 
by laws he did not make and cannot resist. 

CAUSES OF ACTION — CONTINUED. 

Every one knows the causes of action with- 
in himself, without being told by metaphysi- 
cians. 

He does daily what he perceives to be most 
agreeable. He lies down, sits, stands or walks; 
changes the form or color of his apparel ; eats 
and drinks when hungry or thirsty; reposes 
when fatigued, is silent, or speaks as occasion 
requires ; acting in all the complicated affairs of 
each and every hour, directly and immediately 
as the desire arises in his mind, unconscious 
of the agency of a power within, called the 
will, of which he knows nothing but from hear- 
say, or from what he may have read in books. 

But on subjects of magnitude, he pauses to 
reflect ; not that he can create ideas for himself, 
but to await their associations as they rise out 
of the subject itself; and when at length, a sin- 
gle perception takes possession of his mind, he 
acquiesces by a law of his nature, in the disco- 
very of truth, which now becomes the spring of 



THE WILL. 131 

action, by its own direct inherent energy. That 
it should serve no other purpose than to move 
the will, to move the man, is too unreasonable 
to be repeated again. 

PURPOSE, ETC. 

It is not every idea or combination of ideas, 
that puts us in motion ; sometimes they make 
but a feeble impression and vanish without 
effect ; as when a man says, I am half inclined 
to do this ; to buy a house or send my ship to 
Canton. But let him be thoroughly persuaded 
of the advantages of either, and he will act 
with promptitude from the force of his convic- 
tion alone. 

This is what is meant by the will, convic- 
tion action, as he would himself testify, if asked 
to explain the motives of his conduct. 

When we embark in an enterprise with a 
fixed determination to its completion, it be- 
comes a calm and steady cause of action, un- 
moved by accident or persuasion : as where the 
commander of a vessel sails for a distant port, 
his thoughts and actions are directed to a sin- 
gle object, and though he changes his course 
an hundred times, and is driven by adverse 
winds into unknown seas, yet his purpose re- 
mains unchanged and unchangeably the same. 



132 THE WILL. 

How are his actions to be explained, but by 
a fixed determination of mind. A single act 
of the will, or " determiner/' might serve to 
change the course of the ship, but could not 
keep it in the same direction, unless by a voli- 
tion continually on the stretch ; or an unbroken 
succession of volitions without a chasm, which 
it is not pretended can exist. A Freewiller, 
whose will admits of no motive or antecedent, 
would navigate his ship without compass or 
chart, and whether it struck on a rock, or held 
an even course, would be a mere contingency. 
They who regulate their actions by the dictates 
of the judgment, would not differ much from 
the necessarians, whose wills, yielding to mo- 
tives, would bring the vessel to its true desti- 
nation, as would the desires of Dr. Brown and 
his followers, while the weaker motive men 
might, from the pride of system, take the least 
eligible route, and share the same fate with the 
Freewillers. 

CAUSES OF ACTION — CONTINUED. 

We see a man walking in haste, stop sudden- 
ly with his hand on his pocket ; he has lost his 
purse : the thought explains the action ; none 
other can be given. He now retraces his steps 
towards home, where he thinks he may have 



THE WILL. 133 

left it; here again the thought explains the 
action. 

He had not gone far when he suddenly turn- 
ed his face towards the shop where he bought 
his gloves; but before he arrived, he remem- 
bered he had afterwards purchased a book ; at 
this thought, he hastened to the booksellers, 
where he found his purse. Had he made 
twenty other calls, he would have followed up 
his object under like impulses, as the idea of 
each place rose to his mind. 

He who seeks in these instances for other 
causes of action than mere ideas, seeks for 
what he can never find. And if he cannot con- 
ceive how an idea can, of itself, move a man, 
let him learn the fact from his own conscious- 
ness, and not set up a will or other contrivances 
within himself, to explain what can receive no 
further explanation. 

The opinions of Locke and Edwards would 
have been unassailable, had they traced all ac- 
tion directly to sensation and ideas, of which 
every motive or determination must consist. 
The interposition of the will does not at all 
vary their conclusions, since they make it obe} r 
motive, or the judgment of the greatest appa- 
rent good. If it obey, it cannot choose, and if 
its power be limited to bodily action, it cannot 

12* 



134 THE WILL. 

act backwards upon motives, its own cause of 
action. It is necessity in either case. 

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, edit. 1810, 
under the article Necessity and Liberty, motives 
are held to be passive, and their influence alto- 
gether denied. They are said to be "only 
views of things, or mental conceptions, which, 
in the strict sense of the word, are passive, and 
between two motives, the mind determines 
itself without receiving any influence from 
either." 

It requires great courage to deny, in the face 
of all mankind, that neither hunger nor thirst, 
pain or pleasure, judgment, opinion, or belief, 
parental love or love of country, of riches, pow- 
er or distinction, have any influence upon the 
conduct of men : and this at the moment that 
these philosophers are bent upon the pursuit of 
those very objects, every day of their lives. 
They may rest assured they can never make 
converts to doctrines which their own exam- 
ples show they do not believe. 

Let him who denies the influence of motives, 
observe his own conduct at every change of 
circumstance and opinion. Let him be at first 
indifferent to the great question of free trade 
that distracts the whole community : but hav- 
ing afterwards acquired the right to vote, he 



THE WILL. 135 

now feels an interest in the subject, and re- 
solves to investigate it for himself. 

As he knew nothing of the arguments on 
either side, his mind was as passive towards 
them, as paper under the printer's types. He 
studies the subject, reads the public prints, 
attends the meetings of both parties. After 
much labor and investigation, he takes side 
with the protectionists, for in his judgment it is 
a reproach to any country, not to be able to 
feed and clothe itself. Under this conviction 
he sets out for the place of election, determined 
to vote accordingly. On the way he encoun- 
ters an illiterate blacksmith, who, in the sim- 
plicity of his heart, lamented that iron, under 
the tariff, was so dear, that by his labor " he 
hardly could support his family, and that goods 
were so high, he could not give his daughters 
suitable dress to be seen in at church." 

Simple truth, which seldom fails of its effect, 
shook the determination of our voter, so that 
he remained a silent spectator at the polls with- 
out casting a vote. When asked the reason, he 
replied, that he had not made up his mind what 
to do. His answer was perfectly correct, for 
having no decided opinion, he had no motive to 
action. He returned home to renew his inves- 
tigations of the subject, earnestly seeking the 



136 THE WILL. 

truth. His opinions fluctuated as the argu- 
ments pressed on either side, ready to act at 
times with the protectionists, at others, with 
the free traders, when at length he settled 
down in the belief, that the manufacturers were 
enriched by the precise sum levied upon the 
consumer, which he said was robbery sanction- 
ed by law. He now passed over to the free 
traders, attended their meetings, and propa- 
gated their doctrines with unabated activity. 
He acted with decision while he thought with 
the protectionists ; he did not act at all when 
his opinion was unsettled, but again acted with 
decision when it became fixed in an opposite 
direction. His conduct changed with the dif- 
ferent convictions of his mind, and to seek for 
any other motive power, would be as unreason- 
able as to require another organ for seeing than 
the eye, or for hearing, than the ear. 

PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS. 

Let us imagine a necessarian, a Freewiller, 
a lesser motive man, and a disciple of Dr. 
Brown, seated at a table, well supplied with 
all kinds of meats and vegetables, fowl and fish. 

Each guest being asked in turn what he pre- 
ferred, the necessarian, after taking perception 
of the greatest apparent good, and after the 



THE WILL. 137 

determination of his mind by its faculty, the 
will, replied, (as soon as his will enabled him to 
speak,) beef, sir, if you please, for it agrees 
best with me. 

To the same question the free-wilier replied : 
My will, sir, is free and contingent ; it is indif- 
ferent to the agreeable or disagreeable ; it acts 
per se, and does not admit of an antecedent. I 
eat what it chooses of its own spontaneity. I 
await its motion, — a long pause, — the landlord 
stood in amazement. 

The weaker motive man, after showing much 
contempt for the necessarian, applauded the 
free-wilier, who he said was on the road to 
truth, but had not quite reached it ; that the 
will is not only independent of all motives, but 
could act against the stronger and choose the 
weaker motive, and thus act against the cause 
of action itself; that this is true, landlord, you 
shall see. Give me a spoonful of stewed frogs, 
with mushroom sauce; I will swallow them, 
however disgusting, that I may demolish the 
system of necessity, and establish my own 
upon its ruins. 

In the meanwhile, Dr. Brown's disciple, who 
was actuated by desire alone, ate what he pre- 
ferred and left the table. 

The bell of the conductor now summoned the 



138 THE WILL. 

passengers to their seats, whereupon the lesser 
motive man and the hungry free-wilier, whose 
will had not yet stirred, departed precipitately, 
tired of metaphysics, and determined to avenge 
themselves upon the first joint of roasted pork 
that fell in their way. 

FACTS. — PHENOMENA. 

Sensations and ideas and their combinations 
are the only forces that can disturb the mind. 
Of this fact we have the same evidence as of any 
other fact that occurs in the external world — 
consciousness alone ! 

That we perceive light through the eye, 
sound through the ear, pain from a burn, are 
undeniable facts. That we feel joy at good 
news, sorrow or remorse from misfortune or 
crime ; that we are affected to tears by a tragic 
scene; laugh at wit; are angry at an insult; 
reminded of different objects by their resem- 
blances; that the name of any person brings 
up his features, family, position and other cir- 
cumstances appertaining to him ; that any sub- 
ject being mentioned, its associated ideas infal- 
libly rise to the mind; that we perceive the 
relations between things and numbers, and are 
convinced of necessity by the demonstrations of 
a problem; that judgment, opinion, belief, choice, 



THE WILL. 139 

are purely the effect of evidence acting upon 
the mind ; these, and all other like phenomena, 
attested by consciousness, are so many facts 
that constitute mental philosophy, as truly as 
geology or chemistry is an aggregate of facts 
attested by experience. 

The road to truth is through facts, all else 
is " vanity and vexation of spirit." Every man 
is conscious of the true and sole cause of action 
within himself. He knows of no such power 
as the will that can resist or carry his wishes 
into effect. His mind is a book which he must 
read for himself, and not trust to opinions that 
are believed, because they were uttered two 
thousand years ago. 

"I study hard," said Descartes, " but without 
books;" and said Hobbes, "I should have been 
as ignorant as other men, had I read as much 
as they." 

THE GREATEST APPARENT GOOD. 

By this form of words, Edwards meant what- 
ever was most agreeable, without regard to its 
moral tendency. There are virtuous and vicious 
pleasures. The pious take pleasure in the ob- 
servance of religion ; the wicked in the practice 
of vice. Pleasure is equally the motive power 
of both. No man can choose pain for its own 
sake; nor, (which is the same thing) can he 



140 THE WILL. 

choose among motives or objects that which 
gives the least pleasure, without a conscious- 
ness of some ulterior motive ; and he who pre- 
tends to such a power without the motive, com- 
mits a fraud upon the truth, Avhich deceives no 
body but himself. 

The desire of pleasure (happiness) adheres 
to man as gravitation to matter. It is the mo- 
tive power to every action. It never relaxes 
its hold for a moment, and when it shifts its 
object, that instant it seizes upon another by a 
law of his nature fixed in the immutable pur- 
poses of his Creator. 

" Nature," says Jeremy Bentham, " has 
placed mankind under two sovereign masters, 
Pleasure and Pain. It is for them alone to 
point out what we ought to do, as well as to 
determine what we shall do ; they govern us in 
all we do, in all we say, and in all we think. 
Every effort we can make to throw off their 
subjection, will but serve to demonstrate and 
confirm it. In words we may pretend to abjure 
their empire, but are in reality subject to it all 
the while ; systems which attempt to question 
it, deal in sound instead of sense; in caprice 
instead of reason; in darkness instead of light." 

And when anything is to be done, " there is 
nothing by which a man can be made ultimately 
to do it, but either pain or pleasure." 



THE WILL. 141 



WILL AND PLEASURE, CONVERTIBLE TERMS. 

A traveller being asked if he were willing to 
wait for his dinner until 4 o'clock, replied, I am 
willing; that hour pleases me most — his will 
and pleasure are plainly the same. 

When the purchaser is willing to give the 
price the seller asks for his house, both are 
pleased, the one with the thing and the other 
with the price. Being willing and being pleased 
are identically the same. 

The will is not an active principle, as writers 
pretend : it is another name for the pleasure 
felt, by whatever affects the mind agreeably. 
The mind of the purchaser was passive before 
he heard the offer of the seller, and he was 
pleased when he found the object suited his 
purposes. His willingness was the effect of 
the qualities of the house acting upon his mind. 
This is all that can be made of the will, willing, 
willingness. 

When one of a party says, he is willing to 
spend the summer at A. because of its pure air 
and shady walks — another says, that place does 
not please me — what then, sir, is your will ? 
My will is to go to B., where the country is 
more elevated and picturesque — a third says, 
my will is to cross over to Liverpool, where 

1 Q 



142 THE WILL. 

the temperature is always more agreeable than 
in the same parallel on the American coast. 
Had there been fifty in the party, the will of 
each would have necessarily varied with his 
sense of pleasure. 

ACTION. 

When we assign the will as the immediate 
cause of action, we mean nothing more than the 
desire of pleasure, inherent in our natures. No 
other cause can exist, unless it be the desire of 
pain. He that does not know this, has never 
consulted his own consciousness or the actions 
of all living things about him. As the desire 
of food and water explains the actions of a man 
when he eats or drinks — the desire of revenge 
when he resents an injury with blows — the de- 
sire of wealth when he hoards up money ; so 
the desire of any other object that promises 
pleasure, whether near or remote, virtuous or 
vicious, is the sole spring of action from the 
highest exertion of strength, down to the slight- 
est movement of the hand. 

But philosophers, unable to conceive how 
desire can move a leg or an arm, have contrived 
an auxiliary agent they call the will, which 
they imagine acts upon the nerves, which act 
upon the muscles, which actuate the man. To 



THE WILL. 143 

this mysterious power they trace all movements 
from within, while a certain great philosopher, 
with equal sagacity, traced all sensations from 
without, to the vibrations of a nervous fluid. 
The theory of vibrations, however, did not long 
survive its author, while that of the will is still 
kept alive, merely because the existence of such 
an agent has never been seriously called in 
question. 

But most metaphysicians say they are con- 
scious of such an agent within themselves, and 
the Freewillers affirm that it can act against 
motive, judgment, or any determination of the 
mind : for if they admit any antecedent influ- 
ence, the controversy would cease, or they 
would be obliged to compromise with the neces- 
sarians on half way grounds. There is no rea- 
son why these philosophers should not be 
equally conscious of the cause of the circula- 
tion of the blood, or of animal life, as of the 
power that can move a leg or an arm. 

There is another class of philosophers, by 
whom all causes, physical and moral, are per- 
ceived to be supersensual ideas, residing and 
pre-existing in the soul, and connected with the 
understanding by a spontaneity called the rea- 
son, free of time and space. 

Such are the unintelligible vagaries that have 



144 THE WILL. 

brought ridicule upon the science of mental 
philosophy, which, like every other science, 
consists in the generalization of phenomena, 
while their causes abide solely in Him, "in 
whom we live and move and have our being." 

Any attempt to explain the causes of phe- 
nomena, or to understand the nature of power, 
would be an affectation altogether out of place, 
in the present advanced state of philosophy. 

We cannot tell why sugar is sweet on the 
tongue, or aloes bitter; how light produces 
vision, or the impulses of the air causes sound ; 
or how action immediately follows the desire 
to stand, sit, walk, ride, eat or drink — such are 
the facts of experience, beyond which we can- 
not go. 

If, then, we substitute desire for will, the 
clouds that overhang the subject of liberty and 
necessity will instantly vanish, and we shall 
perceive one all-pervading immutable law, the 
desire of pleasure, to be the immediate and ne- 
cessary spring of action in all breathing things 
that inhabit earth, air, or seas, from man down 
to the poor insect crushed under his feet. 



PUNISHMENT. 



13* 



PUNISHMENT. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

We infer the existence of immutable laws in 
the operations of matter, from the constant suc- 
cession of like events under the same circum- 
stances. This reasoning applies with equal 
force to the thoughts and actions of men, which 
have ever been the same in like circumstances, 
from the beginning of time until now. 

Thoughts, from which all actions must pro- 
ceed, have their necessary laws. Nobody 
believes they arise from chance, or that the 
mind can create them for itself, since they must 
be already in the mind, before it can know what 
to create. 

Hence we are taught, the true nature and in- 
tent of punishment in its connection with our 

subject. 

If we suppose with the free-willers, that we 
possess the power of doing the contrary of what 
we actually do, at the same time and under the 



148 PUNISHMENT. 

same circumstances, punishment for a violation 
of the law would be simply revenge for an act 
of the will, in which the understanding took no 
part. But if, on the other hand, we are neces- 
sary agents, shall we be punished for actions 
we could not avoid ? This is a serious question 
that fills the necessarians with dismay : and yet 
the difficulties that surround it will vanish, when 
we reflect that crime is a necessary evil, and 
punishment its appropriate remedy. We shall 
then stand in the same relation to moral as to 
physical evil, both to be combated and overcome 
by the best means human wisdom can devise. 

The question must be answered in the affir- 
mative by the necessarians, who hold that every 
action, whether good or bad, proceeds necessa- 
rily from volition; volition from the strongest 
motive, and the strongest motive from what is 
most agreeable to the nature and constitution 
of the agent. 

Such is moral necessity, differing from phy- 
sical in this, that moral necessity varies with 
the motive, which motive itself may vary a 
hundred times a day; whereas, physical neces- 
sity pervades all matter by immutable laws 
evermore the same. Nevertheless, when once 
the motive is fixed, it is no less certain in its 
effects than the forces of physical necessity. 



PUNISHMENT. 149 

SIN AND CRIME EXIST OF NECESSITY. 

But the solution of this question does not 
require the aid of metaphysical refinement. It 
is to be found in the history of man, who is 
known by his actions as a tree by its fruit. 

The first page of his life is a record of sin 
and crime. As he began, so has he continued 
throughout all the stages of his existence, un- 
changeably the same. 

Education, or the penalties of the law, may 
restrain individuals from offences ; but before 
the species can be reformed, ambition, self-love, 
hatred, malice, lust, avarice, revenge, those ele- 
ments of sin and crime, must be expelled from 
the soul ; for they are as much a part of human 
nature as hunger and thirst, to see with the 
eyes, or to hear with the ears. 

We pronounce that a necessary law, whose 
operations are known through all ages past by 
an uniform succession of like events, as rain 
continues to fall from the clouds, iron to sink in 
water, and rivers to flow to the sea, from the 
beginning as now. 

By the same rule of evidence we are taught 
that men sin from necessity, since they have 
continued to sin through all the generations in 
which they have lived ; and so unrelenting is 
this necessity, that none but the power that 



150 PUNISHMENT. 

created can save them from the doom that 
awaits them. 

Upon this known principle of human nature, 
the legislatures of all newly organized States, 
erect prisons, penitentiaries, work-houses, and 
ordain punishments for murder, robbery, theft, 
and all other crimes before they are committed, 
for the same reason that they provide for the 
daily wants which they know must return with 
every rising sun. 

None but a legislature of free-willers would 
make laws without penalties to enforce obe- 
dience. "Be it enacted, that theft shall con- 
" sist in feloniously taking away the property of 
" another. Be it enacted, that murder shall 
" consist in destroying the life of any person 
" with malice aforethought;" and, if asked why 
no penalties were prescribed, they would reply, 
that neither fear nor hope nor any other motive 
whatever can determine the will ; that it is its 
own determiner ; that, as all men have freewills, 
there is a certainty but no necessity that crimes 
should exist through all time to come; that 
there is a broad distinction between certainty 
and necessity, inasmuch as an event that is 
certain is necessarily uncertain, and may never 
come to pass ; whereas, an event that is neces- 
sarily certain, may certainly take place, if 



PUNISHMENT. 151 

not rendered uncertain by some overpowering 
force. 

It is by such logic, not easily understood, that 
the free-willers overthrow the creed of the neces- 
sarians, and establish in its stead their own, 
which consists in acting without intending, and 
in intending without acting; in other words, the 
act has no connection with the intent, aim or 
purpose of the understanding. 

ALL EVIL, PHYSICAL AND MORAL, EXISTS OF NECESSITY. 

Can he who believes in the power and wisdom 
of God to govern his own creation, doubt that 
all physical evils take place at his command; 
that He caused Herculaneum to be overwhelmed 
by an eruption of Vesuvius ? Fifty thousand of 
the inhabitants of London to be destroyed by 
pestilence at one time, and a hundred thousand 
at another? The earth to open and swallow 
thirty thousand people in Lisbon ? Or, that He 
sends on earth those unnumbered diseases, mes- 
sengers of death, that consign their daily thou- 
sands to the grave ? If He be not the author 
of these events, then He does not retain the 
government of the w T orld in His own hands, 
which nobody does or can believe. 

Moral evils are equally ministers of His pow T er, 
by which He removes the living from earth to 



152 PUNISHMENT. 

give place to other series, destined to perish in 
their turn. 

"If storms and earthquakes break not heaven's design, 
Why then a Borgia or Cataline V 

No one can doubt that the fall of Adam, the 
ambition and conquests of Alexander, of Caesar, 
of Grhengis Khan, the Inquisition, persecutions 
of the Christians, the propagation of Islamism 
by the sword, the sins, crimes, frauds, violence 
and oppression that overrun the earth, were 
foreseen, and must have entered the providence 
of God, or they never could have existed. 

Theologians waste their logic in vain and idle 
speculations upon subjects they cannot under- 
stand. That a Being of unlimited power and 
benevolence should permit evil to exist, is a 
mystery inscrutable to the limited capacity of 
man; and far more mysterious is it to those 
who contend for a particular providence, that 
the innocent and guilty should be confounded 
and made to suffer the same measure of evil at 
His hands. 

The tempest that sinks the ship, or an earth- 
quake that overwhelms a city, is no respecter 
of persons — lightnings, inundations, famine, pes- 
tilence, fall alike upon the helpless and unof- 
fending, the sinner and the saint, the oppressor 
and the oppressed. 



PUNISHMENT. 153 

The guilt of a parent brings disgrace and 
poverty upon his innocent offspring, the igno- 
rant are overreached by the wise, and a great 
portion of mankind are held in bondage by the 
superior cunning of the rest. Idolaters burn 
their little children to appease their angry gods. 
Persecutions, wars, massacres, have reddened 
the earth with the blood of the innocent. A 
single tyrant, by his follies and vices, can destroy 
the happiness of millions — quidquid delirant reges, 
plectuntur AchivL History teaches us that all 
power is founded in the oppression of the weak, 
and upheld by force, that raises the oppressor 
above the retributions of justice, while his crimes 
fall with a wider and more destructive sweep 
upon the unresisting and helpless multitude. 

Again : the erring judgment of man, even 
when he aims at doing good, is often more fatal 
to the innocent than crime. In the complicated 
affairs of human life, we think, err and act from 
necessity every day we live. 

The most skillful mariner, by miscalculation, 
runs his ship upon a rock and buries hundreds 
in the waves. A physician, by mistake in the 
nature of the disease, kills the patient, and 
throws whole families into tears : the com- 
mander of an army, by an injudicious move- 
ment, loses a battle and enslaves his country. 
14 



1 54 PUNISHMENT. 

But errors of judgment do not disturb the 
philosophy of the Freewillers. Their will acts 
for itself, independently of the understanding, 
without having an idea of its own. If they still 
leave the government of the material world in 
the hands of the Deity, they assign its moral 
government to a senseless, lawless power, the 
will, that no motive or instruction can reach ; 
and although they do not explain the nature of 
the shock the mind underwent at the fall of 
Adam, yet the loss of its control over the sole 
spring of action, fully explains that catastrophe, 
and the confusion and uproar that continue to 
prevail in the world. 

APOLOGY FOR EVIL. 

Some divines imagine themselves commis- 
sioned to apologize for the existence of evil, 
lest it argue a want of power or benevolence in 
the Creator. They admit that He made and 
governs the world according to His own good 
pleasure : that all future events were foreseen, 
and must have entered his plan of creation : 
but affirm, that He is not the Author of sin and 
crime, although they exist by His permission, 
and continue to disturb the earth, notwithstand- 
ing He is able to suppress them at will. 

This doctrine, so derogatory to the perfec- 



PUNISHMENT. 155 

tions of the Creator, would disparage an earthly 
monarch, were he to permit robbery and mur- 
der to be committed upon his unoffending sub- 
jects, whom he could, but would not, protect. 
Even a father, were he not to restrain his chil- 
dren from committing like offences, would in all 
countries be involved in the penalties of the 
law. 

Dissatisfied with this reasoning, another class 
of divines affirm that the world is the best that 
could have been made by a benevolent and 
omnipotent Being; and that physical and moral 
evil were instruments in His hands, necessary 
for the production of the greatest ultimate good. 

Such language illy suits the solemnity of the 
subject. Arguing from the light of nature, 
they cannot make the existence of evil harmo- 
nize with infinite power and benevolence, nor 
are they called upon, in the discharge of their 
sacred duties, to reconcile apparent contradic- 
tions. Their duties grow out of the Scriptures, 
which are silent upon what they profess to 
teach.* 

* To assign limits to the power of an omnipotent Being, or 
to attempt to penetrate his motives in the creation and govern- 
ment of the world, beyond what has been revealed, is pre- 
sumption little short of blasphemy. Nevertheless, the New 
England theology now stands charged with teaching that 
11 God could not prevent the entrance of sin into our system ; 



156 PUNISHMENT. 

Divines, theologians, freewillers and neces- 
sarians, one and all, be not over wise ! first 
instruct us in something nearer to yourselves ; 
how you see, hear, taste, or smell ; what moves 
the blood in your veins- — nay, explain the flight 
of an insect, or the growth of a blade of grass, 
before you enter the councils of God, to scan 
the motives and measures of His creation. 

True wisdom exaltetK not herself; she is 
meek, not boastful. Rebuked by her own fol- 
lies, she reasons, now that her locks are gray, 

" he could not govern the world so as to have less sin and less 
" misery in it ; he does the most and best he can to banish sin 
* and bring in holiness ; men persevere in sin in spite of all he 
" can do to reclaim them; he converts and saves as many souls 
" as he can, and would willingly save all if he could ; there is 
"no sinful nature antecedent to sinful acts or exercises; sin 
" is the free preference of the world and worldly good, to the 
" will and glory of God ; infants come into the world as free 
" from sin as Adam ; death no more proves sin in infants than 
" in animals ; the imputation of Adam's sin is unreasonable 
" and absurd ; regeneration is a change in the governing pur- 
" pose of the mind ; it is a gradual progressive work ; there is 
"no change in the nature or disposition of the sinner, antece- 
" dent to the exercise of right affections ; the sinner may so 
" resist the grace of God, as to render it impossible for God to 
" convert him; the agency of the Spirit in regeneration is alto- 
" gether persuasive, exerted through the medium of truth or 
" motives; self-love or desire of happiness is the primary cause 
" or reason of all acts of preference or choice which fix su- 
" premely on any object, &c, &c. ;; — Theology of New Eng- 
land, p. 29. 



PUNISHMENT. 157 

upon things as she finds them, and presumes 
not upon what is denied to her capacity. She 
pretends to no commission from heaven to ex- 
plain or apologize for the existence of evil : 
God is its author; he has so declared in his 
revelation of himself. Sin and crime relate 
only to man, they are words without meaning 
when applied to God : He can do no wrong. 
Sin is the transgression of a law prescribed to 
man, not to himself. He cannot violate his 
own commandments; make graven images of 
himself, or take his own name in vain, nor 
honor his father and mother; nor bear false 
witness against his neighbor ; nor steal or mur- 
der ; for all things, man, and the life of man, 
belong to him. When he cuts off thousands by 
pestilence or war, by earthquakes or lightnings, 
He violates no law. He is a law unto himself; 
there is no standard above him. 

And yet a senseless clamor is raised against 
the necessarians, who are charged with making 
God the author of sin ! God cannot sin, men 
must. Urged by wants they did not create, 
guided only by a weak, erring judgment, they 
live and act under a necessity from which there 
is no escape. 



14* 



158 PUNISHMENT. 



PUNISHMENT, A REMEDY. 



That a man ought not to be made to suffer 
for an act of physical necessity, is universally 
admitted : but shall he suffer for a violation of 
law committed from moral necessity ? Certain- 
ly, since punishment is a remedy, and his mo- 
tive for the act may be overcome by a stronger 
motive, the fear of pain ; and though punish- 
ment cannot efface his guilt, it may cure the 
offender, and prevent a repetition of the offence : 
for motives govern actions, and this is the 
whole secret of parental discipline, and power 
of the law — change the motive, and the conduct 
will infallibly change with it. Motives do not 
stand still : they change with the ever varying 
circumstances in which we are placed : with 
every new desire or want: with fear, hope, joy, 
or sorrow, good or bad fortune : with a word, a 
look from a friend or enemy : with a thought 
of our own, and often vary and take a new 
direction before we finish an action already 
begun. 

The greatest apparent good, whatever form 
it may assume, exerts over our actions a des- 
potic sway, which never relaxes its hold. 

Upon this great law of our nature rest the 
codes of all nations, civilized and savage, from 
the beginning of the world. They settled the 



PUNISHMENT. 159 

question of liberty and necessity upon the influ- 
ence of motives, long before the freewillers' 
heresy was known to exist. Upon the same 
principle rest the denunciations made against 
sin and crime by Him who made man, and 
knew the being He had created. 

punishment a remedy. — Continued. 

If we follow out the natural temper and work- 
ings of the passions of a child from infancy up- 
wards, we shall be convinced that the word 
punishment is strangely perverted in common 
speech, and that in the hands of the mother, 
the preceptor and the legislators, it is as truly 
a remedy for the vices of the mind as medicine 
is for the diseases of the body. 

A child acts solely from the impulses of 
nature; not from reason, for it has none. Its 
desires are at first made known by cries and 
tears. It soon becomes capricious, impatient, 
the most implacable of tyrants. It wants every- 
thing, and is content with nothing. It storms, 
raves, and screams itself breathless when denied 
or disappointed. At the earliest dawn of reason 
the mother's warfare upon its passions begins ; 
first by restraint, then persuasion and threats 
as soon as they are understood. When these 
fail of effect, she has recourse to stronger reme- 



160 PUNISHMENT. 

dies, privation and actual infliction; not from 
the pleasure it gives her, but from a hard neces- 
sity that often wrings tears from her eyes. 

At a suitable age he is put to school, where 
the good effects of maternal discipline are felt 
for a time. But he is soon led astray by wicked 
boys, plays truant, and invents lies to explain 
his absence. The evil grows upon him; threats 
and the ferula produce no change. The teacher 
complains to his father : the boy is called to 
account, weeps and confesses his fault. He 
reforms for a short time, but soon relapses into 
his former habits. Admonition having failed, 
he is again called to account, and a stronger 
remedy is now applied — he is punished with 
stripes. The dread of pain overpowers the 
temptation to repeat the offence ; a change now 
comes over him; he loathes his wicked com- 
panions, the cause of his suffering and disgrace. 
The remedy is effectual, and his reformation 
complete. A like story may be told of every 
child that cometh into the world. If the discip- 
line of the mother, schoolmaster and father, 
were not intended as remedies for the vices 
of mind, then for what purpose were they 
intended ? 



PUNISHMENT. 161 

LAWS ARE REMEDIAL. 

The lawgiver aims at the prevention of crime, 
and reformation of the offender, mostly by bodily 
infliction. A thief who is exposed in the pillory 
and flogged, is deterred from the repetition of 
the offence, as was the truant boy by the chas- 
tisement of his father. Both were made to 
suffer for their misdeeds; and whether it be 
called punishment, or by some other name, it is 
as truly a remedy as medicine for the sick. 
The child necessarily acted out its pleasure 
until corrected by discipline. The thief is a 
grown child, who, when he steals, necessarily 
acts out his pleasure also, in which all agree, 
perfect free agency consists. He steals from 
choice as he abstains from choice, accordingly 
as the desire of the object or fear of detection 
prevails in his mind. If the remedy does not 
always cure the offender, neither does it always 
cure the patient ; both remedies often succeed, 
and as often fail. As diseases of the body may 
be prevented by proper precaution, so may the 
vices of the mind by proper instruction. If the 
vice of mind be incurable, great offenders are 
cut off from society. If the disease of the body 
be incurable, the patient dies. If the vice of 
mind cannot be reached without infliction, so 
the vice of body often requires the surgeon's 



162 PUNISHMENT. 

knife. Neither the lawgivers surgeon derives 
pleasure from the infliction of pain; it is an 
unavoidable attendant on the cure of disease, 
whether of body or mind. 

The Egyptians treated ignorance as a disease 
of the mind, which they professed to cure by 
education. 

The Moderns aim at the same result by more 
ample instruction. We set up schools and col- 
leges, fill our libraries with books, and keep the 
press at work day and night. We reason well : 
raise the motive, and the action will infallibly 
rise with it. Moral evils diminish with increase 
of knowledge, as do physical evils with the pro- 
gress of science. For the vices of ignorance, 
the Egyptian remedy is the cure; when that 
fails, corporal infliction may succeed. Of all 
motives to conduct, the dread of pain is the 
most powerful and constant. Hence legislators 
deter from crime by the penalties of the law, 
and divines from sin by threats of retribution 
in another world. Were the penalties of the 
law to follow the offence as instantaneously as 
pain from a blow or burn, crimes would seldom 
exist, if they did not altogether cease from the 
earth. 



PUNISHMENT. 163 

remedy. — Continued. 

To the evils, physical and moral, that exist, 
we often add others more painful of our own 
contrivance. For diseases of the body, we pre- 
scribe drugs, bleeding, blistering, abstinence, and 
sometimes the use of the surgeon's knife. For 
vices of the mind, which cannot be reached 
without corporal suffering, the law prescribes 
imprisonment, pillory, stripes, and other forms 
of infliction. Both are remedies, painful indeed, 
but administered in kindness. If they fail to 
cure, death comes alike to the patient and the 
culprit. 

Again : a physician interrogates his patient, 
weighs the symptoms, that is, the facts of the 
case, and if he finds the disease to be imagina- 
ry, no remedies are prescribed. So when a 
man is charged with a crime, he is interrogated, 
the facts of his case are examined, and if his 
guilt appear altogether imaginary, he is set at 
liberty. 

But if the symptoms prove the existence of 
a real disease, the patient is made to undergo 
treatment, however afflictive, for his own cure, 
and a caution to others. So if the facts show 
a violation of the law, the accused undergoes 
stripes for his own cure, and a warning to 
others. 



164 PUNISHMENT. 

Who can doubt that the medicine and stripes 
were purely remedies, and nothing but reme- 
dies ? 

But if, as has been shown, physical and 
moral evil come of the dispensations of Provi- 
dence, then crime and disease exist by immu- 
table laws, and the sufferer, from moral neces- 
sity, is in like condition with the sufferer from 
physical necessity; the same law exists for 
both. Let us not complain ; we take life with 
the conditions annexed. God has appointed 
the means to alleviate the ills we are made to 
bear. We contrive houses to shelter ourselves 
from the weather, garments to protect our 
bodies from the cold, and fill our granaries with 
the fatness of the earth. For diseases of the 
body, we find remedies in minerals and plants, 
and for those of the mind in education, instruc- 
tion, and bodily infliction. 

He has likewise extended his providence to 
the birds of the air and beasts of the forest. 
While we trust to the contrivances of art, they 
are taught by instinct to take refuge in the 
caverns of the earth, to seek a warmer sun, or 
to lay up food like the bee, against the season 
of want. 



PUNISHMENT. 165 

CONCLUSION. 

If the foregoing be a just account of the laws 
of thought, then may the question of liberty 
and necessity be stated and settled in a half 
dozen lines. 

Sensations enter the mind by a necessity we 
cannot resist : hence, arise, by the same neces- 
sity, ideas, the vehicles of knowledge, that in- 
struct us by the laws of association, in the 
pursuit of happiness ; that is, in the pursuit of 
the greatest apparent good ; which, when per- 
ceived, becomes, by its own energy, the sole 
and immediate cause of action. 

Notwithstanding our judgments of happiness 
vary continually, whether from new combina- 
tions of ideas ; from instruction, discipline, fear, 
hope, or the circumstances in which we are 
placed ; yet at every change, unsatisfied desire 
renews the struggle, that can never cease but 
in death. 



FINIS. 



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